The Swill to Power

Sick Transit

2007-04-12T23:35:00.002-04:00

You're the curious sort, Friends, so let us recommend a very brief exercise. Type "so it goes" into your favorite news search engine and learn how many journalists went to a high school requiring neither To Kill a Mockingbird nor Catcher in the Rye.

Please, do it. Really. Take the next step, don't just imagine it, don't just dismissively chuckle at our cheap rhetorical framing device. We can't promise anything, but we suspect that you might learn something about reading skills, or maybe something about the kind of readers who become journalists, or perhaps merely something about the formal / generic requirements required formally by generic journalism.

You might, if you're profoundly unlucky, even learn something about America. We did.

Yes, Friends, Kurt Vonnegut is dead, and in the space of just twenty-four hours he has somehow been rendered into a simpering, demi-toothed humanist who has nothing more to offer us than a deeply rooted, avuncular kindness pervading his shoulder-shrugging fatalism.

Sic transit. "So it goes."

So it goes?

So it jolly well does not fucking go.

Which is hardly news to you, Friends, and we're not making a particularly complicated point. We're not going to drag you through the man's full bibliography, even though we've been working on an elaborate pop-cultural joke, the punchline of which is "Vanilla Ice-Nine."

Trust us, it's hilarious.

No, we're not going to point out the various ways in which It Does Not Go. You have perhaps heard it all before, and we know from experience that you are more literate and better informed than anybody currently standing around the Swill's water cooler. We wouldn't dream of insulting you by inserting the equivalent of a Spoiler Alert in a newspaper review of Hamlet, and we wouldn't dream of giving you plot summary of that which can't adequately be summarized.

But it does not go, it will not go, it will not have gone. Sure, Kurt Vonnegut is "gone" -- but what did you expect after a long life punctuated by the shoveling of corpses like sauerkraut, and reeking like sixty years of Pall Mall straights? Did you expect him to go on The View and start hawking rejuvenating juice-makers, perhaps repent and encourage all of his loyal readers to quit their vices and begin acting like good corporate citizens, wake up both bright and early and healthy as a precursor to being wealthy and wise? Did you imagine he hoped to linger just long enough to see someone elected President who can actually use words like "cluster bombs" and "collateral damage" without choking on their own vomit?

No, our point is a simple one: quoting "So it goes" in a putative eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut is like saying "Better Dead than Red" in a retrospective lament for Ethel Rosenberg. Consider the following from Slaughterhouse-Five:

Only the candles and the soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State.
So it goes.

Now there's a passage you won't see Wolf Blitzer quoting with crocodile nostalgia. Why? Because it doesn't come close to fitting the narrative of the day: "Kurt Vonnegut," we're told, "whose prose so divertingly filled hourlong slots of our youth between Health and U.S. History, was not only a Veteran and a P.O.W. and a novelist too popular for Serious People to take him Seriously. He was finally and fundamentally one of those genuine American voices you've heard so much about, and he was American enough to look atrocity in the eye and let it go, chalk it up to the Way of the World, because he knew that slaughter happened and it always, naturally, ineluctably would."

There's no shame in being served horseshit on a platter, Friends, but we shouldn't be proud of going back for seconds. Enough of the requiescat in pace, consider the man's words and utter a res ipsa loquitur already.

We barely have the energy to follow the various rapings and pillagings that yesterday brought and that today and tomorrow will bring, but we reckon we can muster up one observation: "So it goes" may indeed be the American anthem, but not one that Vonnegut's books actually approve: it is the motto of those who do indeed watch fairies and communists and Arabs and Sudanese and Appalachians bombed, burned, starved and dumbed into oblivion, and who can't be bothered to tear their increasingly fat asses away from the TV and the refrigerator and the carseat and the computer to do anything about it.

"So it goes" is the philosophy of Trafamaldorians, which is to say the philosophy of aliens, which is to say a fundamentally inhuman philosophy. It is the righteous mantra of a country where a beer can randomly tossed on your lawn is cause for violent outrage, but the pumping of billions of tons of poison into our air and water is just one of those things. It is the motto for a world where daycare centers full of armless and legless and eyeless Lebanese (or Afghani, or Iraqi, or Cambodian, or Sudanese) children is nothing more than an unavoidable misfortune upon which to expend our collective tongue-cluckery.

But it was not the philosophy of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, and as an epitaph it approaches gross obscenity.

If it goes, then it goes so because we let it and because we go it ourselves, because even reading and reporting the irony in the words is too much work, too inconvenient for folks as busy as we are. And Vonnegut knew it, and he went knowing it, and he went knowing that every last fucking one of us will follow him much sooner than we expected, and if we keep it up, the sooner we all go the better off the world will be.

One Song, Two Masters: You Decide

2007-03-13T00:15:00.000-04:00

Trust us. You'd rather listen to these than to what we have to say today.

While Britney Bravely Battled On

2007-02-28T10:25:00.001-05:00

Some other shit happened. Don't worry about it, but be sure to floss.

Upon Unaccountable Associations

2007-02-10T00:01:00.001-05:00

You know by now that we often have words for and about the dead. We know by now that our interest in precisely which words apply to precisely which dead can strike some of our slower visitors as, well, creepy.

We don't have time to save the slow, but we do hope that you'll go here and read this piece about dead women. We made it to the end and felt simultaneously ashamed to live in this country and glad that there was somebody else around who felt a lot like we do.

And then...

A metonymic chain. Metomotherfuckingnymic. We won't bother you with the logic, friends. We don't have that kind of time, and you don't have that kind of indulgence. Let us just say that we've been struggling with words: how to express just how little we care about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. And that struggle has led us to an unlikely place:

Please feel free to fill in the associations for us.

Meeting Your Needs ad Absurdumb

2007-02-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

Friends, the aptly named "Anonymous" made the bracing -- if factually incorrect -- observation that not only are Foucault and Chomsky both "white" and "male," but that the Dutch audience listening to them was as well.

Let nobody say that the Swill judges harshly, friends, or that we refuse to meet the needs of our readers. No Clear Channel sponsorship or corporate centralization here: your Swill comes straight from, well, you know. The point is that if ye ask, ye shall receive, even if your request relies upon a form of identity politics that we find curious. We report, you deride.

Following Anonymous's incisive, implicit logic, we first offer Dinesh D'Souza arguing that American liberals caused 9/11, and that America could really discourage Al Qaeda if we adopted some of the more "traditional" social positions (relating to women, gays, et al.) advocated by Osama bin Laden. (we'd youtube it, but Viacom say no way).

Next, enjoy Michelle Malkin promoting her book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror. Yes, the book is exactly what it sounds like.

Is our point that there is some sort of correlative -- perhaps causal? -- relationship between degenerated public discourse and the appearance of non-white, non-male cultural commentators? Of course not. Such an assertion would be absurd, and flatly contrary to everything for which the Swill stands, has stood, will stand.

UPDATE: Whom did we originally single out as exemplars of degraded public discourse? Stanley Fish, David Brooks, and Thomas Friedman, all of whom are more or less "white" and two of whom have penises. Read before you speak, friends. Jesus christ.

Our point is that you should think before you speak, whoever you are: Chomsky, Malkin, or anonymous. And that we would like to live in a country and time where informed, intelligent discourse -- rather than low-grade xenophobia and militaristic cheerleading -- made it to the airwaves.

History and/or Nostalgia

2007-02-02T12:53:00.002-05:00

Friends, we don't have to remind you about our embarrassing tendency toward maudlin recollection. For all of our cynical misanthropy (read: tough-minded, demystified realism), for all of our disgusted disbelief in Golden Ages and Greatest Generations, at times we long for the days that used to be.

These are dangerous feelings. This you know. This we know. Look at moments of deep nostalgia for a glorious past embedded in particularly engaging narratives of authenticity (combined with the willingness to fuck over a lot of people) and you have one big fucking fertilized egg just waiting to birth fascism. Distrust people who say things likes "That's just wrong to play that note there" or "Real art does something different, what you've done is degenerate" or "Wipe the cowshit off of the Madonna before I wipe out your whole family" or declare any particular moment to be the pinnacle of art or science or music or anything else.

If we ever begin a sentence with a reproving "Back then" you may kill us. We demand it!

Nonetheless, friends, perhaps we may select moments from the past, evaluate them as best we can in terms of our past and our present and the future that has always depended upon them, and decide that those moments represent something of value: the sort of value that one finds conspicuously absent from our current lives.

We'll cut to the chase: if we have to see -- however accidentally, however fleetingly -- the simpering mug of Stanley Fucking Fish representing the current state of the Public Intellectual in America, well, we may just hurt ourselves.

Or somebody else.

How did we arrive here? How did we collectively become so intellectually lazy, so idiotically passive, so incompletely or perversely miseducated, that Thomas Friedman and David Brooks and Stanley Fish are allowed to pass as intellectual muscle?

We don't know. We can't say.

But we can tell you that there are moments when we look back to a different time and different place; when public discourse didn't arrive as grotesquely pre-digested commonplaces and demonstrably false assertions, degraded wishes masquerading as indisputable facts. These are the moments when we attempt to re-imagine a present by re-arranging a past, to employ the powers of selective memory to construct what Lewis Mumford once called The Golden Day , fully conscious that there had never been any such day.

Then again, through the process of constructing our own historical narratives -- our own highlight reel of nostalgia and longing and loss -- maybe we can find that day, and if we do it right perhaps we can even avoid the sort of low-grade totalitarian fantasies of TRADITION that animate the Right Wingnuts.

So here. Enjoy.

Letter from a Poet

2007-01-25T10:47:00.000-05:00

For the record, Thursday January 25, 8:37 am.

I have a really weird but unshakable feeling my mail is being intercepted & read. Proofs sent to Canadian editor not arriving. I may or may not have written "Death to America" on my correspondence. I probably did. I know I did. (Hey it's not my joke it's from MAD TV (which is on FOX!)).

Anyway, if I'm arrested--which, actually, would be pretty kick ass, and therefore extremely unlikely--do get some Pandemonia from cafepress (before they shut my thing down) & send 'em to Jimmy Carter & Amy Goodman & Bill Moyers... & Farrar Strauss Giroux!

I know this is what you guys would do anyway, but shit, I'd hate to disappear and not have sent this.

Squeezychortle: My first phone call will be to my dad, second one to you.
Swill: I think the business was well concluded. This time.
JT: The real reason I wasn't at that protest was that I really like the war now.

forgive the paranoia or your servant,
T
(and d.t.a.!)

Thomas H. Crofts
Assistant Professor
Department of English
East Tennessee State University
Johnson City, TN
37614

The Swill Hearts Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)

2007-01-18T16:46:00.000-05:00

Barney, Laura, und So Weiter

2007-01-18T16:27:00.000-05:00

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
- Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg trials

UPDATE: Yes, the "Surge" logo comes from a Christian Ministry "Family Night" promotion. Yes, this was intentional. It's intended as a scathing satire against nights.

Captain, There Are Doubts

2007-01-13T00:43:00.000-05:00

Oh Friends.

You may be surprised to hear our voice, but you won't be surprised to learn that we were not among the 45 million people who tuned in to Brave Captain's recent description of the "surge." Don't get us wrong: we have a greater-than-average ability to stare fuckwittitude in the face, as well as more-than-halting admiration for bald-faced, shit-house-rat craziness and delusions of every other stripe.

But recently, Friends, the suiciding and the homiciding and the burning and the raping and the murdering and the under-sentencing, well, it's starting to overwhelm even our seemingly infinite capacity for analysis. And the fact that they're not even really putting their heart into justifying it anymore, well....

And if the President is no longer trying to put together something even half-convincing, and if we no longer have the heart to indulge that twitchy corpse-fucker's murderous, demi-retarded soul-shrugging for even a few minutes on the teevee -- do you think we would have the heart to compose anything original?

Nope. You wouldn't. And you'd be right.

So what better time to reminisce about a time when MTV played music rather than beach-vollyball, even if they mis-spelled the band's name. Enjoy.

Dialogue of the Increasingly Dead

2007-01-11T22:57:00.000-05:00

Can I ask you something?

Yeah, go ahead.

How old are you?

Thirty-six.

That's pretty old. I didnt know you was that old.

I know. It kind of took me by surprise my own self.

- Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

Language Are Hard in Journalist

2007-01-10T13:58:00.000-05:00

JT reacts to "analysis" of the "news":

Already, a contender for stupidest statement of 2007. A Washington Post article on the recent use of the word "surge" begins:

It's one of those words -- like 'chad' or 'blog' or 'waterboarding' -- that's suddenly become the go-to phrase to describe a contemporary phenomenon.

Yes: a deliberately deceptive word is just like a proper name, a contraction of a proper name, and an uncontracted proper name that literally describes the action that it names.

I want to scream.

Another Idea We Wish We'd Had

2007-01-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

Upon the Notion of Externalities

2006-12-29T13:47:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Philadelphia, Friends, where black is the new black, plain is the new attractive, rich is the new smart and it all just seems so goddamn familiar it's like switching back to the right hand.

In short, Welcome to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.

We know we've been gone for awhile, and we know that you're expecting all sorts of snide observations about the smug mystification of academic "radicals," about literature that is subverting, resisting, third-space-of-critique-opening, all sorts of gerunding in the face of manifest social, sexual, racial, and economic inequalities.

You've come to expect it from us, haven't you? If you wanted an informative piece on the MLA that included wacky paper titles, you'd go to the New York Times. If you wanted to know where to get a first-class cauldron of Belgian-style mussels, you'd look -- well, okay also the New York Times. You come here not to learn, but to remember what you might accidentally have misplaced.

Our admittedly lucrative job, therefore, isn't to report, to deconstruct, or even to entertain. Our job in these moments is to remind you that public universities have demonstrably joined their private counterparts in working as engines of inequality, to remind you that "ad hominem" is a satisfying fallacy, but that -- nevertheless, Friends, never-the-less -- people with pensions and portfolios don't have much interest in changing the way business is conducted.

We further trust that you recognize how openly, strongly, and insistently we include ourselves in all of these indictments.

So why do we come here every year? Not for the job opportunities, we can assure you. For us there are none, or at least none that aren't indexed to the manifest and admirable talents of Those We Keep Close By.

No, we come here every year because sometimes the Swill needs to be reminded of things. We need to be reminded of all the research we could have done but didn't, all the articles we might have written but wouldn't, all the thoughts we might have but won't, the people we might know but don't, the conversations we're having that we wish we weren't. The MLA serves for us as a mnemonic string -- no, make that a tourniquet -- that we tie around our index-finger anually, to remind us of how quickly our life is slipping away, and how we're not ever sure if we want to retard or accelerate the process.

But we're not going to complain, we're not going to indict, we'll neither denounce nor announce this year's convention. Why? Because it's the opportunity cost for living a life of relative ease and comfort, no boss on our back and no real back in our labor, if you know what we mean. On a daily basis, we are able to avoid confronting what our lifestyle in academia truly costs, because we externalize most of it and sublimate the rest.

But this year, we're also reminded of something positive: that we can indulge our own decadent sensualities and support skilled Minnesota craftsmen and craftswomen doing their Unionized best to ease the pain of everyday life. How? With a pair of Red Wing Model 875s, $148 with tax. Lifetime boots, friends, that are simultaneously classic, cutting-edge, cozily familiar and shockingly styslish. As an added bonus, there are no fingernails of Indonesian 12-year-olds to be found stuck in the tongues.

Expensive? Not at all. Red Wing Shoes and Boots are just one of those increasingly rare moments in American consumer capitalism when you are allowed to confront the full cost of your comfort.

We're not sure whether or not you'll hear from us again in this Foulest Year of Our Lard. We don't have the stomach to look back on what we have done, much less on what we did nothing much to prevent in 2006.

But do know that, through all the bile and guile, we will have loved you all.

And Iran, Iran so far away...

2006-12-14T15:32:00.000-05:00

In our continuing spirit of generous giving, we offer you -- Dear Friends!!! -- more thoughts from prominent members of the Collective Swill, the very power and rarity of whose words makes them unfit for weekly consumption. In short, we're not sure you're ready to handle them frequently.

This week, we're joined once again by Mickey Bones, an unruly thinker and iron-fisted administrator who has long served as a sort of Shadow Swill. Bones is the kind of writer who knows more dead languages than you do, who knows more about Irving Berlin than you ever will, and who enjoys the protection of more than a few gonnegtions. In short, give a hay-ho swillcome to Mickey Bones, whom we recently approached with questions about the conference in Tehran. The responses are characteristically pithy and cogent.

*****

For those who are interested questions concerning the connection between the Holocaust and the existence of the state of Israel, here’s the answer: there is none. Moral justifications are not sufficiently persuasive to maintain the continued existence of states. Besides internal cohesion (i.e. nationalism), states are made possible by the political function they serve for other states (i.e. realpolitics).

Historically, the geo-political function of Israel has been to help a world power dislodge another world power from its control over the resources of the Middle East.

Examples:

Balfour Declaration 1917: The British support Palestinian Jewry as part of a strategy to dislodge Ottoman control of the Middle East.

Outcome: Successful. The Ottomans lose their Middle East empire to Great Britain.

UN vote of 1947: The USSR supports a two-state solution as part of a strategy to dislodge British control of its Middle and South Eastern empire.

Outcome: Successful. The British lose most of their empire to the USSR.

Yom Kippur War of 1973: The USA supports Israel as part of a strategy to dislodge Soviet control of the Middle East, specifically over Egypt.

Outcome: Successful. Egypt becomes a client of the US, the USSR loses its Middle East Empire to the US.

The irony of this strategy is that once successfully executed, Israel the ally becomes a liability to the colonizing force, since local populations do not tolerate the existence of Jewish state power. It has usually taken a period of two or three decades before the former allies become outright enemies. The US and Israel are in that transitional period right now.

Probable future:

(1) Israel and America will part ways.

(2) Israel will find new allies that wish to dislodge American control over the resources of the Middle East.

(3) America will lose control over the resources of the Middle East.

If the Holocaust had any role in creating the State of Israel, it was to remind Jews of the obvious: power and political function are the only justifications that matter.

- mb

Ballad of Deading Gaol

2006-12-10T21:33:00.000-05:00

Dear Swill:

The passing of Pinochet, with all its alliterative charm, puts me in a bind. As usual, I rejoice when a public figure I detest dies--it's nice, nice to outlive the assholes who make the world such a grim place for so many. Even the glum thought that there's an eternally- replenished source of venal scum doesn't quite dim this bit of Schadenfreude.

Parties were thrown at Phredward's when Francisco Franco finally kicked the tube, when Reagan joined his ancestors, when the grotesque John Paul II finally went to greet Peter at the pearlies, when Jean Kirkpatrick, that totalitarian prune, allowed her small heart to burst one night, when Hassan II of Morocco, against whom my family nurses a very particular animosity, one of my relatives having spent seventeen years in Hassan's jails, alternatingly suffering torture and isolation, shuffled off his mortal coil.

Yes, good deaths, all of them.

But among these good deaths that have come, limpingly, to evil men and women, Pinochet's provokes some of the most mixed feelings. Not because yours truly joins the flocks of Chilean bourgeois fools and US neocons-in-the-totalitarian-vs-authoritarian-mold, à la Kirkpatrick--of course not. Because the more-or-less peaceful death at the fine age of 91 of a particularly disgusting criminal so ripely proves that justice doesn't come when called (or even when summoned by drop-dead gorgeous Spanish judges like Baltasar Garzón), and because this confirms one's own views, viz., that justice, being nothing in particular, never comes on time, if at all.

I am gladdened, horribly, in this way: the worse the perpetrator, the more awful the crimes, and the less he or she is punished, the clearer the thrown circumstances of folks become--the clearer it is that no gods, justice or even Baltasar Garzón, however loudly or persuasively addressed, will show up to toot the final trump. I have an obscure sense that Primo Levi, and Paul Celan, and Jean Améry bumped into this sense, maybe once too often, in the years after they left the camps, after Nuremberg.

In any event--here's a sentence I address not to justice, who won't show and might not be welcome at my party if she did, but to another no-show whom I prize as highly--the thousands that Pinochet had tortured and killed, the disappeared, the lost: compañeros, the pig is dead, and you are not forgotten.

Phredward

Why Didn't We Think of That?

2006-11-30T00:46:00.000-05:00

Good God, it's been too long. Our blood is fairly boiling, but since we've been silent for a few days and we're enjoying ourselves we thought we would give you first peek at what may well be the most innovative, intriguing, pragmatic, law-abiding, and downright invigorating political-social idea of the last eight years.

Of course we didn't think of it ourselves. No, Friends, give a big hearty Swillcome to our new Assistant Senior Managing and Features Assistant, JT.

Believe it or not, just a few short weeks ago, JT was slaving away down in the mailroom, fighting off advances from some particularly randy recent Princeton grads (aside: if you want to keep journalism semi-profitable, hire folks whose parents can afford to support them for a year or two while you pay them slave wages or, better yet, they "intern" for free. It's pretty much standard practice in the business, and has the added bonus of keeping executive washrooms and editorial columns free from society's, ahem sturdier elements).

Hell, we understand. We try to avoid the mailroom ourselves. But when you have to go, friends, you have to go, and while looking for our keys on the way to the parking garage, we were unexpectedly seized by what felt like a thousand starfish running straight down our colon, and we had no choice but to dash into the unisex shitter that is usually reserved for all of the good men and women who work Downstairs.

Whilst spraying figurative mud on the back of the literal bowl, we found ourselves moaning the mantra that has comforted us for many moons and through many dark hours: "Impeach," we lowed, "Dear Christ it's tearing the ass right out of us I-M-P-E-A-C-H."

Now, you know we're not used to being contradicted. But on the perhaps mystically important third growl of "IMPEACH," a voice pointedly emerged from the stall next to us. What follows is what we heard, and, well, the rest is herstory:

"Fuck impeachment" the voice said. "I've got a new strategy: deport him."

Depor? Wha?

"Look, dick," the voice growled, "Houston Chronicle reports that Immigration Services is test-driving a new citizenship exam, featuring questions that emphasize not factual knowledge but the applicant's understanding of 'the meaning behind some of America's fundamental institutions.' So, for example, rather than being asked 'What was the Emancipation Proclamation,' as the exam does now, one might be asked 'What were some of the causes of the Civil War?' But then we get this... [here the voice paused briefly, we heard the sound of newspaper pages rustling, throat-clearing commenced, and the following was read aloud]:

Another possible question would delve into the
nation's system of checks and balances.

Currently, immigrants are asked "What are the
three branches or parts of government?" The
answer: executive, legislative and judicial.

But a draft test question asks: "Why do we have
three branches of government?"

An acceptable answer might be, so that no
branch is too powerful. . . . Or another
acceptable response might be, to separate
the power of government. . . ."

[What came next -- shoutingly, insistingly, righteously -- blew not only our mind, but the remainder of our pancreas straight through a starfish-shaped emergency exit, if you catch our drift. sorry. - ed.]

"ATTENTION NANCY PELOSI: PUT THE PRESIDENT UNDER OATH, ASK THIS QUESTION, THEN DEPORT, DEPORT, DEPORT!"

Genius will out, friends. And that's how you rise in the ranks of journalism, Swill-style.

Assorted Notes on Killing (Part VII)

2006-11-15T23:31:00.000-05:00

We are both nearsighted and cagey, Friends, and we therefore refuse to speculate as to whether the future does or does not last forever. We can and will wholeheartedly confirm, however, that our post-election giddiness lasted but a few short days. Our liver and our door-knocking knuckles yet throbbed with painful satisfaction when we realized that mere personnel shifts aren't going to winch us from our national and global nightmare anytime soon.

What, you don't live in a national nightmare?

Lucky fucking you. Just wait. We don't know when it'll hit you.

What we and all longtime readers of the Swill do know, however, is that we are smack dab in that time of year when complicated minds turn to uncomplicated facts: that urine smells; that it's not darkest just before dawn but coldest; that meat doesn't grow on trees; that a bullet through the lungs produces a sort of luminous frothy spray; that arteries bleed brightly; that dark heavy drops disappearing in 100 yards mean muscle (and, in circles we inhabit, secondarily mean that somebody fucked up).

In short, Friends, the killing time is upon us. Time to put away the long knives, because short knives are more efficient (and don't threaten to perforate one's colon if one happens to sit upon them for too long). Time to rub oil over the leather pouch your mother brought you back from vacation when you were eleven, and time to rub your grandfather's "Old Timer" knife over a white stone with just a few drops of oil; time to wish you had listened a little more closely when your grandfather was trying to give you what is turning out to be -- however briefly -- truly useful information. Time to prepare yourself for truly understanding the cycles of life, for freezing your ass off, for communing with the great outdoors, for connecting with family, for acknowledging History and Nature.

In short, it's time to invoke a number of romantic categories in order to justify obtaining meat from the wilderness rather than from the grocery store or the bistro. Experience tells the Swill that if enough of these categories are invoked -- and if the language is gauzy enough and one appeals frequently enough to Tradition -- one might just barely escape being branded a mouth-breathing redneck (or worse, a Communitarian).

This is only part VII in what promises to be at least an VIII-part series, Friends, and it's going to be an early morning as we make the great treck north, seeking neither fame nor fortune but merely a plate full of dinner without Safeway's moniker tattooed upon the main course. We have a bottle of Hoppe's #9 that is calling our name, an assload of wool socks to pack, and some quiet thoughts to entertain.

But we promise to get back to you in just a few days with Conclusions We Have Drawn.

Our Influence Spreads

2006-11-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

Sweet sweet SusanG over at dailykos has (perhaps unwittingly) adopted our "Inhabit the Frame" strategy, which -- in terms of our tactical acumen and political-theoretical savvy -- pretty much makes us the Ken Mehlman of this week.

Without, of course, all the crushing defeat and self-loathing.

Now This

2006-11-09T22:37:00.000-05:00

Is how you start restoring a sense of justice -- if not justice itself -- to a democracy.

Yes, Friends, Democracy Now -- the exception to the rulers -- has reported that "The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, is heading to Germany today to file a new case charging outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with war crimes for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay." Read more.

UPDATE: Well, as long as we're charging people with war crimes...

Election Hangover

2006-11-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

We're not speaking metaphorically, Friends, but rather with a resolute attention to literality that is appropriate when one is counting votes.

Yes, after many hours of worrying, calling, walking, shilling and shrilling, we took a few hours last night to get so drunk we could hardly see. Then, realizing that a half-finished job is a job poorly done, we got so drunk we couldn't see at all. At $1.50 per pint of the allegorically and patriotically appropriate Pabst Blue Ribbon, we exchanged our canvassing clipboard for a $20-bill and went to work with a resolute vengeance. Shouted "Fuck You" at big-screen televised images of Joe Lieberman. Bummed and smoked a Camel straight for old times' sake.

Yes, Dear Friends, we put the "ass" back into "assiduous."

Is this perhaps why we are incapable of doing anything today besides staring demi-blankly at the computer screen and hitting the "refresh" button every fifteen seconds? Is this why we can't shake this feeling that seems to comprise equal parts glee and unnamable dread? Could filling our belly with two gallons of Pabst Blue Ribbon be the only reason why we're only able to muster half of a fist-pump this afternoon?

There is, after all, much for which to be thankful. As Glenn Greenwald writes:

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious — a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression and election fraud tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games — can all be overcome. They just were.

Indubitibly cause for a celebration, and we're not ones to fuck with a well-earned day of rest and Schadenfreude.

Over the next few days, however, we suspect we'll need to get to the bottom of the dread, or at least gesture to skimming the scum from the top of the pond. When we do, we'll be sure to fill you in on the complicated matter of Why You Should Be Happy But Not That Fucking Happy. Until then, let us put away our long knives, pet the cats, read a book, and sip some tea. For weeks, it has seemed inappropriate to speak of anything but the election; today, it seems inappropriate to speak of it too clearly.

It's Not Too Late

2006-11-06T12:46:00.000-05:00

To Do More Than Vote.

Everyone Agrees

2006-11-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

We are often approached by conservative (sic) friends, who say "Swill, how can I vote against my party, my President, my dreams, my hopes, my fears, my family. I'm a conservative, after all, not only in terms of my registration, but in terms of my identity."

Here's one for you, kids, from that liberal rag-sheet The American Conservative (a publication with which we have our -- ahem -- issues, but which is reliably to the left of the New Republic about 75% of the time).

Go ahead and read it. Yes, it turns out that even Conservatives (sic) agree: the GOP is a sickness, and it's the duty of every Conservative to vote against them on Tuesday.

Enough already.

The Virtues of Complainte

2006-11-03T09:54:00.001-05:00

At this late date, friends, it should come as no surprise that we advocate objections, complaints, outrage, irritation, agitation, and general gadfly-by-nightery. We believe that calls for collegiality and comity are generally little more than thinly veiled attempts to quell dissent and stifle the sort of genuinely agonistic discourse that once -- perhaps in a mythical long ago -- looked like democracy, unfettered inquiry, etc. If we were more Continentally piquant in our thinking, we might even proclaim that consensus is little more than the carnival masque of hegemony, the pleasant soundtrack that enables the deepest of grotesqueries.

You'll further note that the Swill has historically displayed very little patience for firm distinctions between speech and action, between "writing" and "doing something."

Today, friends, we're going to ask a little something different of you, and it's a not inconsiderable request: Put Up or Shut the Fuck Up.

Don't want to live in a gay-baiting, incompetently militaristic, Intelligently Designed, imperial theocracy? Don't want all the downsides of fascism without the compensatory consolation of an efficient railway? Not entirely convinced that mercury is the nicest spice in your fish soup? Think that women should be able to make the choice about when and under what conditions they're going to reproduce?

Well, do something besides complain. The $100 that you sent is fine and necessary -- Thanks! -- but we don't have time right now to lecture you on direct action, fungibility and monetary theory and shit.

Call your local candidate's campaign office. The fact is that you can do something useful -- even if it's only sit in the warm comfort of your own living room and make a few phone calls. Hell, you can even make a few phone calls from somebody else's living room: just go HERE to sign up.

If you like your current representation, and your particular congressional representative isn't running for re-electation right now, or if your particular congressional representative or governor or whomever is in no danger of losing his or her seat, you might think about the fact that your representative doesn't run the whole fucking show. Are you too busy? Are you too tired? Does it seem like a hassle? Are you nervous about calling strangers, or having doors shut in your face?

Boo fucking hoo. Shut the fuck up. We're hardly asking you to storm the Bastille.

You get the point, and we've already written too much for too few people. We're off to spend the next few days in a major metropolitan area, knocking on doors and convincing people to get off their asses and vote for the people we want to represent us.

"Why" you ask?

Well, not because we think we can have a noticable effect. Not because our messiah complex would ever find an outlet in something so quotidian as working in an election. Certainly not because we would lay claim to the baddassery of that guy whose portrait appears above.

No, it's because we would be ashamed to complain if we had spent this weekend taking care of chores, catching up on our reading, or watching sports, or grading papers. And we don't want to shut the fuck up.

We'll see you on Wednesday.

UPDATE: Here's another MoveOn way to get involved this weekend, even if you only have 20 minutes to spare.

Apropos of Absolutely Nothing

2006-11-02T13:51:00.000-05:00

We find ourselves unaccountably amused by the following headline.

Bush und Kerry lassen die Funken Fliegen

Although perfectly standard German, our mirth probably has something to do with conflicted, condensed, and dispensed nostalgia for the Clinton era.

Not Bad

2006-11-01T11:42:00.000-05:00

But if we were in charge of this campaign, we might have added something about this (PDF) result of the Iraq invasion and occupation. We suppose that's why we're not in charge of campaigns.

Clarification

2006-10-31T13:02:00.000-05:00

Friends, we've been overwhelmed by the response to our suggestion (found here) that we embrace and infest neoconservative frames and destabilize them from the inside. We ask that you consider this move not as politics stricu sensu (in Lenin's sense of what people do to one another), but rather as a Preface to Politics: this is what Walter Lippmann called it in 1913, while he was still more or less a Wobbly-sympathizing Socialist and before he became a fluffer for Goldwaterites.

More on this later.

For now, you'll recall that our suggestion was to counter the Republican's "Fight them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them on Main Street, U.S.A." frame by pointing out the tacit admission of what we already know to be the case: that neither Republicans nor Democrats really want genuine immigration reform.

Why? For the same reason that Woody Guthrie wrote "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)": Because there's a whole bunch of fields to be worked, meat to be slaughtered, and lawns to be mowed in this great land of ours, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to employ people who are scared of being arrested, pay taxes but don't collect benefits, and don't strike for human working conditions. And that's as true for embarassing Clinton powerbroker Zoe Baird as it is for deluded psychopath Tom Tancredo. (Full disclosure: We once cleaned the basement of Ms. Baird and her husband, Yale law prof. Paul Gewirtz. They paid us under the table, though the working conditions were OSHA-compatible. Lemonade was served.)

Yes, despite what you may have heard, there is a strong progressive argument for meaningful documentation of workers. For the moment, we will spare you our critique of the progressives, and keep to ourselves the anarchist conviction that it is borders and states themselves that cause the problems. You've had enough for one day.

Wish in One Hand, Shit in the Other

2006-10-30T00:21:00.000-05:00

"And see which one gets full faster."

This was our grandfather's standard response whenever the word "wish" would unsuspectingly creep into a sentence. Kind of a snotty thing to say to a kid, but he had his reasons for being rather unsympathetic toward juvenile, subjunctive desires: he killed a bear at the age of thirteen to feed an authentically hungry family, enlisted at the age of fourteen (to ease burden on same family), and at sixteen endured what was reportedly the longest sustained depth-charging of a submarine during WWII.

Tell that to your kids the next time they get weepy for a new iPod.

Don't tell it to us, however, as we'd rather have the iPod. Furthermore, unlike him, we don't get mean in the vicinity of gin, and that should count for something, even outside of puritanical circles. Just because you killed a fucking bear doesn't mean you get to be a bastard, and just because you were a member of the putatively greatest generation doesn't mean you were the greatest human.

In any case, he's been dead for twenty years, and so far as we know he won't fuck with our wishes tonight. For no particular reason, and in no particular order, we therefore reckon we'll admit the Top Three Things we wish we were doing right now:

Drinking with Hussey in Edinburgh
Using the maul to get through oak and manzanita
Not being able more or less accurately to predict how the rest of our life is going to unfold

If nostalgia is ever mentioned in our presence, we'll rightly denounce that and deny this. But right now, at this late hour, shitting in either one of our hands seems like a pretty poor substitute for what we're wishing.

He'll Be There All Week

2006-10-29T23:11:00.000-05:00

Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."

How to Fuck with Republicans (pt. 56)

2006-10-29T14:05:00.000-05:00

As you know, Friends, there has been ever-so-much talk about how the Radical Right has successfully "framed' the political discourse in the United States.

Rather than "violating every conception of international law since the Treaty of Westphalia by invading a sovereign nation with no plan what to do next," say "The war on terror has many fronts" or "Liberate the Iraqi people." Rather than admitting your belief that "Rich infants should become rich adults regardless of whether they work hard or have talent," say "Repeal the Death Tax" and "Capital gains taxes weaken America."

Easy and fun, but the consequence of such successful "framing," you'll recall, is that people become total fucking idiots who are incapable of critical analysis.

Our point? Well, we just wanted to remind you why we started this series in the first place. Rather than trying to "re-frame" topics so that they're more amenable to Our Way of Thinking, we ask that you accept the frame, own the frame, and then fuck with the frame in its own terms.

Easy and fun!

This week, we have Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), who reminds us that

...defeating al Qaeda [in Iraq] is important, because if we were to pull out before we win, we will embolden every terrorist in every corner of the world, and then instead of fighting them in Iraq, we'll be fighting them on every street in America.

Swill response: "So you admit that you can't secure our borders against illegal immigrants?"

Watch their heads burst with the logic!

Easy and fun, friends, easy and fun. We invite you to join.

This Message Brought to You By Death and Romanticism

2006-10-27T17:57:00.000-04:00

Ah, you thought that the treacle-meter at the Swill was already off the chart? Fools. God only knows how low we're capable of sinking.

In any case, to indicate how fucking bored we are with life right now, we took five minutes out of our "work" to post our first video on youtube. Does it depict us manning the barricades, stopping voter fraud, dancing on treadmills or splashing a moneyshot across some highly transgressive target?

Sadly, no.

It does, however, depict leaves falling in our backyard. It's all we've seen for days. In fact, and in all seriousness, the images are secondary to the almost traumatically gorgeous Schumann Lied (based on a Schiller poem), which is sung by the legendary Anne Sofie von Otter: Des Sennen Abschied.

Please, sit back and have a listen. Summer is gone, she sings, and she's really too fucking right.

This Land is Our Land

2006-10-25T20:49:00.000-04:00

Egotists that we are, we simply assume you're interested in our Weltanschauung. Why else are you here? Since we don't really have a Weltanschauung, you'll have to be content with our literal world view.

Therefore, please enjoy the view from the window, at our home, under which our desk sits. We're not sure whether we enjoy it or not.

George W. Bush Speaks Coherently

2006-10-16T15:43:00.000-04:00

Dig the leader of the world use the word "mundane" correctly. We always suspected we'd like him better as a drunk.

We Should Be Mortified

2006-10-15T10:41:00.000-04:00

You know, friends, even we are occasionally misguided. I'm not entirely sure what we were thinking by demi-eulogizing the great Freddy Fender -- who is dead and gone from lung cancer (not one of the most pleasant ways to go; write for more details).

No, if we had any sense of ethical priority, we'd have spent twice as much time eulogizing this guy, Ali Partovi. You don't know Mr. Partovi, and he is still alive, technically. He's been incarcerated and tortured in a private Arizona jail for the past five years.

The charges? Ha ha.

The crime? Ha ha.

None of the above. Please read this story before you leave today, and before you're tempted to say something genuinely misguided about how the death of Freddy Fender -- whom you don't know, whom you've never met -- is "sad."

The Next Teardrop Fell

2006-10-15T00:10:00.000-04:00

Yes, Freddy Fender had a pretty good run, and -- as far as we know -- he made it through without starving to death or anybody dropping depleted uranium on his children or raping and torturing him without ever being able to see the charges against him. Yes, his was a real pre-9/11 kind of death.

So let's not have any weepy calls for our thoughts to be with his family, or with him, or any such nonsense. Such gestures are silly at best, and possibly verge on the obscene. Let's just watch and listen.

Schmatisticks

2006-10-11T00:51:00.000-04:00

Come on. We simply can't believe it. We know that we haven't seen 655,000 dead people in the New York Times or Parade magazine. No, that seems too high to us. Yes, based on our extensive knowledge of the situation, we think that seems a little high.

Furthermore, upon reviewing the statiticians methodology, we've concluded that one simply can't trust numbers, particularly ones we don't understand, which are admittedly almost all of them.

Now, if the people were Amish and there were fewer than five, well, we might wrap our heads around the issue and worry about the state of civilization and shit. But 655,000? That's what Kant referred to as "too much."

You may now return to your regularly scheduled tongue-clucking. We do.

Support the War Effort

2006-10-09T14:03:00.000-04:00

Friends, you're well aware that the Swill welcomes people regardless of political affiliation or ideological position. We're deep into truth here, goddammit, or at least we're into rough mobilizations of truth regimes.

Therefore, you won't be surprised to learn that, although the stated stance of the editorial board is staunchly, critically, and immovably anti-war, we have valued staff members who really do support the effort to make Iraq's system of governance look like Rhode Island's. Who wouldn't want to live in Rhode Island, after all?

So, by way of pouring them half a glass of ice-cold "your opinions matter to us," we bring you this public service announcement. If you have access to an email address with an .edu domain, please click HERE for more information on how to help conservative college students help America. It's fun, it's easy, and your country will thank you.

Upon Being Not Surprised

2006-10-06T00:55:00.000-04:00

Maybe if they brought Robert MacNeil back, PBS would be less biased than ABC news?

And you thought the reason we supported community radio and Democracy Now instead of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was because Maura Liasson is a FOX (as in News Corp.) and Amy Goodman is a national treasure, the living definition of why there's a First Amendment and why "Journalist" is an honorific moniker that should be selectively wielded by those who are engaged in the struggle to disseminate vital information about the res publica to the publica: criteria that excludes 90% of the U.S. press corps.

Wait. That's what you thought? Because that's actually true. Sorry.

Ramblings Upon the Fucking of Children

2006-10-04T23:07:00.000-04:00

That's what the brouhaha is about. A santimonious, repressed, distasteful Republican inviting children to fuck via instant messages, other sanctimonious, repressed Republicans covering for him, one sick and twisted bastard fucking children and then shooting them, and a different sick and twisted bastard just shooting children, but having originally intended to fuck them first.

Jesus Christ, that was our week in America, friends, and it's looking increasingly likely that this is what's going to tumble the most venally incomptent administration of the last 100 years: the figurative fucking of children. Not legalizing torture, not pissing on habeas corpus and repealing the Magna Charta, not exploding the deficit beyond repair, not accelerating the end of life as we know it on earth, not spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fuck up Iraq, not sending cluster bombs over to be dropped on Lebanese day-care centers. Nope. A child (actually kind of a demi-child, since the age of consent in the District of Columbia is actually 16, but we digress).

Why? Well, because -- as our embedding of the Ned Lamont advertisement below will attest -- children are cute, and vulnerable, need adult protection, and the small black ones are sassy and entertaining (Lamont, whom we love, actually looks more like Conrad Bain than Alex Karras). And in just a few short days, the Republicans who somehow had convinced a majority of the voting public that they could protect Der Homeland are revealed as being unable to protect the children in their own office building. As Kos himself -- whose smart, tough work we love and admire -- wrote today:

These people have been in DC too long -- Hastert, Reynolds, Boehner, Shimkus, Lieberman, and anyone that continues trying to defend the inaction of a House Republican leadership that put their own political power above the safety of the House's teenage pages.

Hear, hear. I couldn't agree any more, and I'm willing to go along with just about any narrative that accelerates the supplanting, drawing, quartering, and humiliation of these Republican fuckwits. These are serious times, folks, and after six years it may well be time to have some serious people running the show. These days, Republicans simply aren't serious people. The congenital Republicans whom we know -- and to whom we are related -- are indeed, serious people, and wouldn't vote for Denny Hastert or John Boehner or George Bush with a gun to their head.

But let us be serious, too.

A wide swath of the children living in the District of Columbia are fucked every single day, and neither Denny Hastert nor Bill Clinton nor the George Bushes nor John Kerry has, was, or is going to do a goddamn thing about it. I'm not talking about participants in the Congressional page program, whose parents drop them off at lacrosse practice before making large contributions to politicians who will get them admitted to the program, which turns into college admissions, which turns into, well, lots of things, but sometimes only after they fend off felonious sexual advances (which they can probably get really fast, since they have DSL and stuff).

What, you thought they were admitted to the Congressional page program on the strength of standardized test scores?

No, Dear Reader, we're talking about the children who belong to the 15% of all D.C. residents who receive food stamps, but who don't have a grocery store in their neighborhood; the non-cute, non-sassy black boys who make it past the single worst infant mortality rate in the country, and live in sub-standard housing and attend broken public schools, can look forward to joining the highest per capita prison population in the world. They'll be incarcerated, you see, at a rate 49 times that of their white neighbors.

After recently enjoying the outrage over racist shitwad Sen. George Allen's (R-VA) ill treatment of a University of Virginia student, we even more recently watched The Boys of Baraka. One is a Confederate General from So. California and one a moving documentary portrait of several African-American kids from inner-city Baltimore, who are willing to travel 15,000 miles for a seventh-grade education, and thus attend free boarding school in Kenya for a year. (Spoiler alert: they don't end up at Choate.)

Consequently, we thought about titling this post "The Boys of Macaca," because that would have been a good pun and made us very briefly happy. But we didn't.

Because none of it ends happily. Because Mark Foley will go to a very nice rehab facility and then to a very nice jail, and then will do just fine. The Democrats will or won't take the House back, and will or won't take the Senate back. We're spending time and money and effort to make sure they do just that, but either way Denny Hastert (R-IL) will step down and become a highly paid lobbyist whose kids -- if the twisted goblin fuck ever reproduced -- surely won't attend public schools in the District of Columbia.

Why? Because he's protecting them just fine. There are different kinds of children in the District of Columbia, and some have DSL piped in their bedroom and some have bullets pumped into theirs, and some collect rare stamps and some hope for food stamps, and all of them need protection and they won't get it. The whole world needs to be protected from Mark Foley, and to know this you can look at his voting record rather than his email; this includes Hastert's children and Hillary's children and Al's children, and for now they're probably getting all of the protection they need to be great, happy, well-bred successes in life.

Bet your ass they've been shielded from the sassy black kids who aren't on television.

Learn About Joe Lieberman (I-Amadick)

2006-10-04T14:48:00.000-04:00

We hope you enjoyed this spot by Ned Lamont (D-CT). If nothing else, our presentation of it proves that the Swill is kind and humanhearted and can be touched: in a sentimental, figurative, cute way, not in a Dennis-Hastert-has-to-approve-it kind of way.

Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman

Now paste these links into your blog under the link "Joe Lieberman." Why? Because of technology and politics and shit.

Chickenhawks

2006-10-03T00:12:00.001-04:00

Thank you. Thank you very much. Try the veal.

Another Prick in the Wall

2006-09-17T14:24:00.000-04:00

Friends, The Swill hasn't been lax, hasn't been smirkingly disrespectful of our duties to you, The Reader. No, in fact our silence comes from a place of profound respect: for your delicate sensibilities, your unerring nose for quality, and your admirable lack of patience for Low Standards. We're sad to say that we've had nothing to say that would pass your tests; you've repaid our kindness with your resounding silence.

We are, therefore, pleased as punch to offer some new thoughts from none other than Chirch Van Crash. You remember Chirch -- decorated combat veteran of the 82nd Airborne, heavily laureled semi-professional athlete, homebrewer, and Doctor of Philosophy -- from his thoughts last Veteran's Day, and we're pleased to offer him a forum for his thoughts. - The Swill.

Hellooooooooooooooooo People!

Been a long time since I've had an inkling to say much of anything, at least publicly, about politics and/or the “thieves, thieves and liars...murderers, hypocrites and bastards” (to borrow the timely words of Alien "Al" Jurgenson) that run this world. But yesterday's bullshit breakdown of common sense and fairness demonstrated by the PAC 10 officials in the Sooner v. Duck game has driven me from that comfortable place called College Football Fandom back into the real world.

And what a fucking horrible place it is.

Moving from ESPN.com to NYT/ CNN/ FOX/ GOP.com has left me depressed, maniacal and hating god, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed more than ever. (Please feel free to include any other cock-sucking deity you prefer. They all suck cock [cf. Deadwood – The Management.]. I ask, though, that you NOT include any of the Egyptian, Greek, or Roman studs who endorse[d] excessive drinking and carousing. Ass fucking, too, but more on that later.)

The specific piece of shite that's attracted my attention this week is the way we, the U.S.A., have decided that the best way to demonstrate our success in Iraq – Baghdad in particular – is to build a wall around it. “Look into my eyes, oh you patriots of America, and repeat after me. ‘Walls are a goooood thing. Walls keep baaaaaad people out so people on the inside can live in freeeeedom. Freeeeedom. Freeeeedom.’” I mean, what the fuck and why not? The Chinese built one and look how free they are. Kept out those horrible Mongols so today's folks get to kick it in Tiananmen Square. The Jews threw one up around Warsaw to keep out Nazis, right? How happy, free and safe they lived. Oh yeah, nothing says freedom like death from cholera and starvation.

The Soviets had the metaphorical Iron Curtain and look how sweet it was for the Hungarians, Poles, East Germans, etc. Oh, wait. The East Germans had one of their own. What about North Korea? Another awesome place where people live in freedom, enjoying lives of excess and luxury. I guess we can call the 38th parallel a “wall,” don't ya think? They might even have a, holy shit, BOMB! Now THAT is freedom. What about the smart muthafuckers in Mordor? How fucking awesome was it that the Orcs and whatever/whoever the fuck else lived there figured out the best way to keep those pesky Elves and Hobbits from preventing its residents living in peace, freedom and prosperity was to build a bad-ass walled citadel to ensure those nasty fuckers would be kept in their place.

And don't forget (Oh yeah!) that we're on the verge of building OUR OWN WALL down south Mexico way. Fuck'n A! Nothing says "FREEEEEEEEEDOM" like an electric fence and a shoot-on-sight, shoot-to-kill policy. Well, Maybe Mel Gibson, but he's on the outs these days. Man, I really wish I lived in Gaza or the West Bank. Those entrepreneurial Palestinians have it right with THEIR wall. Maybe they'd let Braveheart time share in Ramallah? I'm pretty sure he “gets” it. Oh how lucky the two Israeli soldiers in Gaza are to be on the inside. What are the odds? It's like they won the Freedom Lottery!

You know, though, the best way to look at this is through the long term. After all, Disneyland, has a wall. Build the Baghdad Wall, hire some of those Freedom Lovers from Sadr City to work the entries, and charge everyone admission! Do you suppose it would cost more to get in or to get out? Fuck it. Charge a fortune regardless since we'll have to pay the gatekeepers. Hell, once the Wall's up they'll have to PAY to live in freedom, right?

“Oh, what's that Jamal? You have children you can't feed because you have to pay rent and you're not making enough working the gate? Well, it just so happens we need a few more kiddies for the Ramadan fireworks show this weekend. Have them put on these vests and show up outside the Mosque at 8PM, Friday. Press the button at 8:30 SHARP. They can wear these funny mouse-ear hats, too. But we want them back after the show.” Mmmmmmmm-- hmmmmmmm!

Did Jacko have a wall around Neverland? He sold it, right? I think he's now enjoying the freedoms of the Middle East, Motown style. Maybe MJ and John Mark Karr could hook up for some fun with freedom luv'n Macauley Culkin? Word is he doesn't have a whole lot going on these days. Then again, there is that age thing. If I were a bettin' man I'd put my money on the likelihood that Jackson and Karr prefer their friends’ hint-of-stink to be more akin to pee than man sweat. Unless, of course, he's been hittin’ the cabbage in OKC, spending the night in freedom behind the wall of the Oklahoma City jail. I've seen freedom from that side. It totally smells like piss.

Well, I guess that's it for today. Back to reality. I plan on building a wall made entirely of Red Delicious cans around my television. That'll leave me in the enviable position of being free to watch the NFL, free from interference by my roommate, AND it'll demonstrate my commitment to the environment: I'll be recycling! And tonight? With all the good karma I'll be getting by living free and being “Green,” I'm gonna find me a peace-loving hippie and ass fuck her until her brains spill out her ears and shit comes out her nose! Behind MY wall, of course.

Hope she doesn't have one. If I burn it down I'll have to fuck a corpse. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.... Crunchy on the outside, mushy on the inside: Baghdad Double Stuff; a desired commodity of freedom lovers everywhere.

Chirch van Crash

For Our Delectation

2006-08-21T00:35:00.000-04:00

Youngstown, Motherfuckers

2006-08-17T23:52:00.000-04:00

And we're not talking about Boom-Boom Mancini, we're talking about Justice Hugo Black's opinion that is cited repeatedly and trenchantly in This Right Here. It's a pretty good read, actually, so take a few moments, absorb a few good lines, and be the single most impressive motherfucker around the watercooler tomorrow.

By the way, if you see the woman to your right on the street - the author of the above document - shake her hand and thank her for being down with that whole democracy thing.

ADDENDUM: Okay, so perhaps we're not celebrating yet, which I would not have known without Correntewire. Nuts.

A Real Red Alert

2006-08-14T16:13:00.001-04:00

Take two minutes, head over to Crooks and Liars and watch this, then email it to your idiot uncle who insists on spewing dumbasseries like "cut and run." It's a very brief monologue, surprising to none of you (we hope and trust it's unsurprising, sweet informed reader) about the implications of the very first Homeland Security Red Alert.

You're young and full of life, friends, but we were born and barely bred in the Cold War. Though this places us one grandpapa step closer to our eventual doom, we nonetheless easily distinguish between fake-ass, fear mongering red alerts like those dropped this weekend by Michael Chertoff, and the quite authentic Red Alerts such as you'll find below.

Enjoy. And next time you head to the public sphere, ask yourself which Red Alert you prefer: the one presided over by Richard Perle, or the one featuring Slick Rick.

In Need of a Name

2006-08-14T12:33:00.000-04:00

Your most recent experience of metacognition -- that is, a moment when you sense or feel that you know something without being able to recall precisely what it is that you know -- was probably an instance of what psycholinguists refer to as the "tip-of-tongue" phenomenon. Right now, for example, we're pretty sure that we know a more elegant, single word denoting the "tip-of-tongue phenomenon," but it's right on the tip of our fucking tongue and we can't recall it. Nonetheless, somewhere and somehow deep in our brain, we know that we know this.

What we're pretty sure we don't know is a word to describe a similar state of metacognition, wherein we are unable to produce not a single word, but rather an idea. "Tip-of-the-hypothalamus" doesn't really roll off the tongue, "conceptual retardation" is inelegant and and "stupidity" seems imprecise.

Whatever the phrase, there are several bits of informational flotsam that have been bouncing around our head for the past several days, which we know are connected. Sadly, the precise form and significance of the connection eludes us, so for a moment we'll get all Walter Benjaminian on your asses and let you figure it out for your own damn selves.

Novelist Günter Grass admits he served in the Nazi SS during WWII. Some folks suggest that he return his Nobel Prize, or at least his honorary citizenship in the Polish city of Gdansk (see Here and Hier).

Factors to consider: Grass was a teenager, and it's not as if he carpet-bombed Cambodia or became Pope. Still, you know, he might have mentioned it.

The New York Times admits that it publicly mischaracterized (euphemism alert) the length of time that the paper sat on the NSA Wiretap story. Said mischaracterization prevented readers from knowing that the story was purposely withheld so as not to affect the 2004 presidential election (see Here).

Factors to consider: Just when you have reason to consider lifting your boycott of the Grimalkin, you're unsurprised to learn that yet another Times semi-culpa comes -- in the words of Günter Grass' biographer -- "a little bit late."

III

A poll conducted by "the world's most visited Christian Website" concludes that 50% of Christian men and 20% of Christian women are addicted to pornography. 60% of Christian women reported "problems with lust" (by which we infer that the other 40% found that being married to a Christian took the desire right out of them).

Factors to consider: They're the kind of Christians who define "addiction" as "regular use," so you can imagine the rigor of their statistical analysis. Respondents might well believe that the Academy-Award winning film adaptation of The Tin Drum actually is pornography.

A report in the American Journal of Public Health concludes that "Adolescents who initiate sexual activity are likelyto recant virginity pledges, whereas those who take pledgesare likely to recant their sexual histories. Thus, evaluationsof sexual abstinence programs are vulnerable to unreliable data.In addition, virginity pledgers may incorrectly assess the sexuallytransmitted disease risks associated with their prepledge sexualbehavior."

Factors to consider: The White House's budget for the 2007 fiscal year includes $204 million dollars for abstinence-only education. The Society for Adolescent Medicine has shown that abstinence-only education is not only ineffective, but counterproductive to its own stated goals. We once had sex in the small chapel of a small college, and it was really awesome (we're not sure how this affects the conceptual work, we don't believe in suppressing events from our past, and also we just like telling people about it).

*****

That's all we have right now, friends. Consider these tidbits not merely as a group, but as a constellation -- a cluster, if you will -- and report any of your speculations directly. We need to know what to call these developments, even if the name we give won't be used by anybody else.

International Relations

2006-08-10T12:55:00.001-04:00

NOTE: If you believe that our new habit of embedding video in our posts is 1) the giddy overindulgence of schoolkids who just learned a new game and 2) a blatant rip-off of Crooks and Liars, you're right on both counts. Good for you.

Friends, we have been simply overwhelmed by the response to our demi-triumphant-semi-return. The mail has been pouring in, and a few people have actually refrained from death threats. Nonetheless, many recent correspondents have echoed an historically common complaint about The Swill: that we're too serious, that we need to "lighten up," that we of bring "everybody down" with our constant harping about depleted uranium, dropping bombs upon babies, et cetera.

Well, we hear your cries and, like Hillary Clinton noting the election results in Connecticut and starting to sound just a little bit like a Democrat, we respond with something positive.

How about saying something positive about treaties? The Bush Administration is positively trying to rewrite the Geneva Conventions and insulate themselves from being rightly prosecuted for War Crimes!

We're not exactly sure how we feel about domestic or international agreements -- we're just average Americans, after all -- but we do know that seminal 1980's hip-hop MC Special Ed once remarked that he had a "treaty with Tahiti," based upon the fact that he "owned a percent."

Loving America First, we don't get out much, so we don't actually know how to assess Tahiti's obligations to the Geneva Conventions. For the moment, we'll assume that as a pays-d'outre-mer of France (signatory of the GC), all of French Polynesia is therefore obligated to honor international prohibitions against torture, degrading and humiliating treatment, etc. We also strongly believe that Special Ed himself is a strong defender of these values.

Therefore, on the positive tip, Watch and Learn.

World Class Scottish Swill

2006-08-09T17:30:00.000-04:00

Swillians Quake More Earth

2006-08-09T11:58:00.000-04:00

Yes, friends, it wasn't so very long ago that the Swill called forth to its legions with a request to send money to Ned Lamont. You caused, and he effected.

Nota Bene: Ned doesn't really need your money in a large sense, as he's a fourth-generation Harvard grad and all that, but he needed it in a tactical sense, in the sense that money is imagined to "talk." When Lamont takes his seat in the Senate, we will return to our regularly scheduled denunciation of inherited wealth, the class system, and the broader imperative to storm his estate wielding torches and force his attractive children to work for a living, gain seats at universities through something resembling a meritocracy, etc.

Yes, we denounced Lieberman, we endorsed Ned, and once again our Word was made Flesh. Kind of.

Recall last February, when our Food and Style editor opined:

Senator Joseph Lieberman is a cheap shill for the corporate elite, a low-rent bullyboy who plays upon the worst instincts of fear and jingoism, and should be called a "public representative" only in the broadest, loosest, most degraded sense of the words "public" and "representative."

And what ho! The demos -- note the "o" in there -- kicked Holy Joe in the nutmegs and Lamont served his ass to him on a plate. As a diarist over at that other really popular blog trenchantly remarks:

In one corner, you had a bunch of unpaid volunteers, Internet rabble-rousers, and an inexperienced politician whose highest post had been County Selectman.

In the other, you had the three-time Senator, former vice-presidential candidate, visible party statesman, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, the other popular CT senator Dodd, most of Organized Labor, the women's groups and the environmental groups, most of traditional Democratic party support, paid lobbyist support, paid armies of GOTV staff, the slick ad money, the top DLC consultants, and a 3 to 1 budget gap.

I'm sorry. That's not David vs. Goliath. This isn't even the NBA champions versus a rec league team. That's more like an ant vs. my shoe.

Thanks for the memories. We were so exhilerated as we followed the returns coming in that we momentarily switched over to full-flavor Miller High Life (on doctor's orders, we've been drinking the Light stuff, but more about this later).

Yes, Joe, we will have to suffer your smarmy rictus and indulge your nauseous pablumous claptrap for about fifteen more days, at which point Hillary and Chuck and Russ -- and perhaps your own incompetent campaign staff? -- will convince you to honor the primary process, and you'll tearfully bid farewell.

Now, on the downside, you'll no longer be able to enjoy the delicious navy bean soup in the Senate cafeteria on a daily basis. On the upside, however, you'll be free to continue your eighteen years of lobbying for the insurance, financial services, and pharmaceutical industries, but without having to write tiresome letters of recommendation for applicants to the military service academies.

Fare thee well, Joe, and Fuck You Very Much.

Upon the Killing of Small Things

2006-07-25T13:40:00.000-04:00

Just a brief update to remind you that, even though the Swill has been mostly paralyzed for the past month, we're not technically dead.

Our silence could be attributed to a number of factors -- indolence, aphasia, boredom, reticence, frenetic attempts to accomplish something other than the refinishing of hardwood floors -- but in the end just know that our silence results from Having and Having-Not: Having too much to do and Having-Not Access to a computer during the late-night hours when we are wont to enjoy an ice-cold bottle of Miller High Life and share our thoughts with you, Our Friends.

Until our Fortress of Multitude is complete, we thought we owed you at the very least a friendly wave hello. We thought this as we were in the backyard, once again revelling in our ever responsible stewardship of the earth, unlike the lazy fucks who pat themselves on the back for not driving an SUV but can't be bothered to hang their laundry out to dry.

As we whipped clothespins about with alarming dexterity, we noticed a trio of baby robins in the grass, all of them swarmed by wasps, flies and ants. Two of the birds were doornails, wasps emerging from their eye cavities, food for worms and thought, etc. One of them, however, was yet flopping about, attempting to drag itself on demi-feathered wings away from what must have been a less than enjoyable way to go. We therefore did the most sympathetic thing we could, and smashed the head of said bird with our 16-oz. ripclaw hammer.

We were placidly unperturbed by our coup-de-grace, and this was not the first time we've intentionally and directly taken the life of a cute animal. There was a jackrabbit we accidentally paralyzed with a Willys Jeep in 1985, whose skull -- since we lacked a hammer or firearm -- we struck repeatedly against the trunk of a lodgepole pine. (Rabbits, by the way, sound disturbingly like screaming babies when they are in agony. Just so you know.) In the summer of 1986, the owner of a cattle ranch paid us twenty-five cents for every digger-squirrel tail we brought him; those cute little fuckers paid for our car insurance that year.

Oh, the guts of ducks, doves, and deers we have known!

The point is that we considered it a mercy killing; indeed, we fervently hope that if we're ever in the process of having our eyes eaten by wasps whilst dragging ourselves across a back yard, some kind soul will come along and smash our head with a ripclaw hammer. In short, we're not given to moral-allegorizing the smashing of skulls.

Since our bucolic laundry hanging was interrupted quite specifically by the smashing of a baby's skull, however, we thought we should probably check with the broader world to make sure that we weren't engaging in anything unethical, unlawful, or untoward. We recalled, after all, that 55% of the casualties in Lebanon are younger than fifteen, and though we don't even particularly like children -- ask anybody who knows us -- we're sticklers for legal and ethical conformity.

Who better to consult in these matters than a Professor of Law at Harvard University? Our attempts to get advice from this leading light of legal authority were sadly unproductive; turns out Dershowitz didn't have thing one to say about baby birds. He did assure us, however, that the smashing of skulls of Lebanese and Palestinian children isn't necessarily a bad thing. Finally, somebody looks at both sides of bombing civilian infrastructure and targeting civilians with U.S.-made weapons of mass destruction!

This we can use.

Before we feel totally comfortable with our skull smashing earlier today, however, we need to find out whether a baby robin should be considered as more or as less human than a Lebanese baby. Further, we'll need to investigate to discover whether this bird was sympathetic to the cause of those bigger birds who drop bigger turds on our car. If they were, well, I kind of wish I had put a bit more ire into and derived a bit more moral affirmation from my delivery of doom.

Our ethico-ontological calculator is currently offline, so it may be a few days before the final results are available.

ADDENDUM: The writer of this headline deserves a raise.

Our Impending Triumphant Return

2006-07-11T16:33:00.000-04:00

Good Christ, friends, we have always admired your intelligence, your wit, your political instincts and your grit. But never 'til now did we realize that perhaps your chief virtue is your patient indulgence of our unprofessional hiatus.

So patient, so indulgent, in fact, that we're going to break a long-standing prohibition and offer you this, a tantalizing glimpse of one of our trusted staff. For the continued safety and security of our personnel, of course, we've added a little black box to preserve this particular staffer's identity. Okay, so Jayne Mansfield he's not, but we just really want to impress upon you that we're not just fucking around: we've been attempting to recapture a bit of that authentic capacity for production from which we've so long been alienated.

When the physical structure and infrastructure of our new headquarters is brought into the twentieth century (telecommunicationally speaking), we'll offer an actual statement for your consideration. Until then, pinch your partner or yourself in the nicest way you can...

Just Us

2006-06-21T22:32:00.000-04:00

We Speak, They Act

Friends, it appears as if the Swill is on a roll: subsequent to our posts earlier in the week, even more Marines and one sailor have been charged with murder. Bad for them, good for abstract notions of justice and the mildest gesture toward the rule of law, yes yes yes you know all that. But you're not here to be reminded of symbolic gestures (what else is the rule of law, after all), you're here to lend a hand, to pitch in where the pitching is welcome, to help a weblog on a mission. We call for indictments, indictments are handed down (strictly, they're handed "up," but you're not specialists and we don't want to make anyone feel unwelcome). And you're here to make it all happen.

Accident? While reminding everybody that correlation is not causation, we'd also like to remind everybody that We Think Not. You're a part of this juggernaut, friends, so hold on while we spill some unfortunate beans about an internal shake-up.

Yes, even with such a string of demi-successes (we'll say Justice succeeded when the last king is hanged by a noose made from the guts of the last priest: until then, there is no such thing as lone justice), we've decided neither to rest on our laurels nor to make more waves in the military-justice system, but rather to take care of some metaphorical and literal housecleaning. Taking the cue from Our President, we'll be abandoning our official duties and spending the next week engaged in a ceremonial rite known only to a select few: not the cutting of mesquite brush, not the sick Yalie veneration of stolen bones, but rather the Exorcism of an Apostate.

Upon Our Infinite Tolerance

Due to our own indolence (and a typist who was out sick with a scabrous finger -- believe us, you don't want to hear that story) we didn't share the story of the dinner we shared last week with a real-live Episcopal Priest. Don't laugh: we have dinner guests, and sometimes our dinner guests have dinner guests, and their guests become our guests, and the next thing one knows there's a goddamn Priest sitting at our table, eating our hummus and drinking our wine (unfamiliar with the niceties of theology, we forbade him from any transubstantiating: not because we object to the magic, but because one of us is a vegetarian).

Because the laws necessitating hospitality toward strangers overrode the laws commanding us to poke fun at Priests, we were sweet as pie. That doesn't mean it's not fun to poke fun at priests, just that it's too easy, and that in the end a good dinner served with ample wine and light, suggestive banter with affable folks is our own form of evangelism. We therefore refrained from pointing out the very basic illogic underlying his reasoning, smiled wanly when he ordered us to stop reading the Rituale Romanum (specifically the exorcism rites contained therein) for Latin practice, and enjoyed another glass of chilled rosay. Nice guy, somewhat overfond of calling for the High-Five. We imagined it was a vestige of youth group.

Anyway, friends, he offered up heart-chilling tales of parishioners who have recently been beset by demons, spirits, imps and whatnot, and sad tales of his attempts to exorcise those demons. Turns out the demons were too tough for him -- they may well have been unionized -- and he's resolved to call in the big guns: in his words, "I've tried everything, and it's beyond me. I think it's time to call The Catholics."

We agreed, sent him on his way, and opened another bottle of rosay. Everybody happy.

Exorcisms, Parallels Are Drawn, &c.

Why the fuck would we admit -- to you, of all people? -- that we allowed a priest at our table without attempting to arouse any liberation-theology envy, without quoting Bertrand Russell, and without even saying "Look, we like you, have more hummus, people can believe what they want to and associate with whom they like, but -- between us -- you have to admit that Christianity is pretty stupid. C'mon, you can tell us. Our lips are sealed." Are we patting ourselves on our own back, crowing at unprecedented civility?

Non.

No, friends, what we're trying to say is that it doesn't take a Priest or a Demon to call for an exorcism. Despite our best efforts, despite our vigilance and support and ideological purity, despite our love and our hate and our genuine attempts to ensure that everybody who's on board remains above board, a key member of the Swill staff -- a Swillian Senior Grade, if you're keeping records -- is not only defecting, but defective.

Despite the air of world-weary insouciance, we long detected a faint whiff of corruption emanating from this person, a trusted friend and colleague at our too-small compound. Turns out the innards and outards were just fine, but there was nonetheless a rot of a most serious socio-economic-political stripe; after some keen detective work, we discovered that this person had abandoned most of the principles by which we here stand, and Purchased Property.

You know as well as we do, friends, that all property is theft. But we have no word low enough for thieves taking possession of a tidy two-bedroom ranch with original oak floors, small fireplace with pine hearth, woods in front and behind, definitely needs some aesthetic adjustments but that's what wallpaper stripper is for, right? No words, and most importantly, neither phone nor internet whilst we engage in our stripping, swabbing, drilling, laying, pounding of both tongues and grooves, etc. Plus, by long tradition, cameras will be checked at the door.

We will therefore be reporting back to you intermittently on the process by which we expel a formerly trusted member of our select order. But it may be a few days. Bear with us: in the meantime, did you ever think that perhaps we'd like to hear from you? Jesus.

A Question for Potential Recruits

2006-06-20T16:29:00.000-04:00

Thanks to The Masses.

GWOT is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

2006-06-18T11:05:00.000-04:00

6/20 UPDATE: Fucked. And it gives us no pleasure.

6/19 UPDATE: An hour ago, three Marines serving in Iraq were indeed charged with murder. Man alive, is it ever satisfying when our weblog journalism produces such immediate and drastic results in the military courts. No word yet on whether the two guys who got captured by masked militants will be treated as prisoners-of-war or as "enemy combatants". . .

To the two U.S. soldiers who have been captured by masked militants near Yusufiya, Iraq: you've been busy doing other things, so you may not have kept up with the theoretical minutiae in the GWOTorture.

Don't Worry.

The Bush Administration considers the Geneva Convention's ban on cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners of war to be, well, "quaint." And, Bush appended a signing order to the Congressional torture ban, which legal scholars agree gives him a sort of "get out of torture ban free card." And, lots of detainees have been kicked, beaten, or suffocated to death while in U.S. custody, and none of the kickers, beaters, or suffocaters have been convicted of murder.

But don't worry. I'm sure that the masked militants hadn't noticed. Even if they had noticed, I'll bet you can count on them to uphold the standards of conduct set by the United States government.

Seriously, though, you're fucked. Sorry.

Healthy Brews

2006-06-14T00:50:00.000-04:00

At last. Amidst all the kvetching, quailing, bailing and wailing that passes for commentary around here, once in a long while we feel obligated to spread a little bit of the Good News. (Spoiler alert: if you arrived here looking for baby-jesus-good-newses, there's no real reason to continue). To wit:

Seems that a new study by some of those scientific types confirms what any moderately balanced person already knows: alcohol and coffee go together splendidly. Not just in the many delicious varieties of hot toddy, but in that weirdly bilious / delicious organ known as one's liver. That is to say, alcohol and coffee go together to make you a better person.

Literally.

See, it turns out that each cup of coffee you drink today will decrease your chance of developing alcohol-related liver damage by 22%. This means that the editorial board of the Swill has, in addition to a pointed and well-publicized regard for Old Style beer, a minus-1076% chance of developing cirrhosis over the course of our lifetimes. We drink so much coffee we're pretty much a walking fucking antidote to liver disease.

Yep. If it weren't for the fact that the country is lousy with dumbfucks, we'd be tempted to find in these results the first glimmering evidence of Intelligent Design.

He Hates Those Cans!!!

2006-06-09T16:45:00.000-04:00

Howdy Friends. We're Back. More or less.

We'd like to say that our long absence is due to the fact that our cousin took a lot of pills and died, which she did.

We'd further like to excuse our absence by remarking that she killed herself after her husband, a deacon in their evangelical church, admitted to playing hide the tabernacle with her twelve-year-old-daughter, which he did.

We wish our twelve-year-old cousin's words upon learning of her mother's death hadn't been "If I hadn't told, she would be alive." But they were.

Sadly, that's not why we've been gone: we've been gone because we just don't have much to say. We'd like to reflect upon our cousin's death by quoting extensively from Hume's essay "Of Suicide," or from Nietzsche's touching remarks on the subject in Twilight of Idols, or perhaps even just by saying something funny about Seneca or Petronius, two guys who knew something about the art of dying. But we're sick of Hume, we're not grieving for her, and furthermore we're not really grieving at all: we just haven't been feeling very garrulous.

If there's still anybody out there, and you have any thoughts about things we might say, the suggestion box is hereby open. Until then, consider the beach.

Yes, friends, the Israeli army scored a huge victory today in their ongoing war against beach sand. A family on a picnic somehow got in-between the artillery shell and the intended target; The Guardian UK just reported that

The shells struck a large crowd at a beachside picnic, killing six people and wounding more than 30 others, the Palestinian health minister, Bassem Naim, said. A woman and two young children, six months old and 18 months old, were among the dead, medical officials said. All of the dead were believed to be related.

We are unsurprised: sand has long been known to employ human shields.

James Madison Didn't Support the Troops

2006-05-31T23:54:00.000-04:00

Mr. Chairman, I most cordially agree, with the honorable member last up, that a standing army is one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen. It is a great recommendation for this system, that it provides against this evil more than any other system known to us, and, particularly, more than the old system of confederation. The most effectual way to guard against a standing army, is to render it unnecessary. The most effectual way to render it unnecessary, is to give the general government full power to call forth the militia, and exert the whole natural strength of the Union, when necessary. Thus you will furnish the people with sure and certain protection, without recurring to this evil.

— James Madison, 06/14/1788, Virginia Ratifying Convention.

Stay Away

2006-05-11T10:24:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

You probably don't need this kind of encouragement, but don't bother checking in until Tuesday, May 16th.

The entire staff of the Swill is currently on a corporate retreat; not only are we engaged in all types of ropes-courses and cerebral team-building exercises, we are conducting research for our upcoming series on things that made Milwaukee famous, but that may or may not hav e made a loser out of us.

yrs
The Swill

Upon Making Fun of President Asshole

2006-05-07T17:25:00.000-04:00

History has not revealed a deeper irony than the destruction of the spirit of democratic liberty in the name of devotion to it, which we have witnessed in this nation in the past five years.

In this situation, appeal to the courts is of less moment than individual courage in every relationship of life. What is wanted is the courage and the ability to resist the tide, to fashion satirical weapons against the demagogues, to defeat the fools with the weapons of both scorn and laughter.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, 1952

Who Was Never Called What?

2006-05-05T21:33:00.000-04:00

Please go to google, type the word "asshole" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Make sure your sound is on.

Thanks to JST for this one.

Things Lighthearted

2006-05-03T23:38:00.000-04:00

Dear friends, you know that we have a wide variety of interests here: when you tune in, you expect to be regaled with reflections upon everything from wainscoting to handwoven tweeds, frothy pints of Kentish ale to untranslatable passages from Juvenal. We love it all, and we love you for loving it with us.

If in recent days we have become unattractively petulant, perhaps even abusive -- to you, of all people -- we apologize, and after a few brief moments of housecleaning we promise you nothing less than useful advice of a cheerful nature. In order to get the predictable business out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible, we're going to abandon our usual lambent prose and just get right to the fucking points.

Item:
Upon learning that Z. Moussaoui will get no Texas justice, and will instead spend the rest of his life in prison, Dubya announces that "Evil will not have the final say."

If he's right, we only hope that the final say will go to Stephen Colbert, who actually and thankfully wasn't funny at all: I'm still waiting for somebody to tell me just what the fuck is so risible about secret prisons, torture, global climate change, and a foreign policy based entirely on greed, photo-ops and depleted uranium.

Evil was unavailable for comment.

Item:
A 19-year old Harvard student plagiarizes her novel, the plot of which concerns a young woman's triumphant admission to Harvard, after learning that what she really needed to do was loosen up, get frisky, and have some fun.

First of all, we believe we're the first to note that this was also roughly the plot of Risky Business, wherein a wealthy kid from a good school gets into Princeton only after learning that Ivy League admissions respond better to blow jobs than they do to SAT scores. (Apparently admissions officers also respond to rich kids who hire expensive admissions consultants after not attending public school but rather "Public" school in a cool Scottish way, which is how Kaavya Viswanathan got in, but that's for another post).

Yes, she plagiarized passages such as these (no, we're not going to cite where we got this comparison, because we're metaplagiarizing):

From Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts: "Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart."

From Miss Viswanathan's book: "Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty."

Seriously, does this sort of thing trouble you? Are you worried about what kind of message this situation sends to America's youth? Do you think it suggests a certain moral or intellectual decline?

Because if you do, you're a fucking idiot.

You're a fucking idiot like the Harvard undergraduates who flooded the Crimson with letters pointing out that Viswanathan also lifted passages from The Princess Diaries. What's offends us is not that a 19-year old would plagiarize -- god forbid we were ever held responsible for what we did in our 19th year -- but that America's putative academic elite have memorized a novel that our ten-year old niece recently described as "too simple to be interesting" (true story, we kid you fucking not, etc.).

Want your kids to enjoy an inspiring bit of realism that carries a useful lesson? Tell them that by virtue of the fact that they're your kids born into your family in your class, they've already missed out on all the statistically significant ways of getting into a first-tier private university. If that depresses them, just point out that society will probably collapse before they would have had a chance to matriculate.

Okay, friends, having wiped that out of the literal cracks in our figurative floor, we have our first installment of a series (nota bene, we've abandoned our idea for a Baedeker to American Paleoconservatism: we realized a few days ago that the project was starting to feel dangerously like work). This week?

Liquor One Can't Afford Not To Buy

Say it with us, friends: The Grand Macnish.

A Scotch whisky that has been distilled continuously since 1863, but that is (much more significantly) to be found in your local CVS pharmacy, and never for more than $7.99 per 750 ml bottle. It's warm, well integrated, a classic Highland malt that requires neither branch water nor ice nor stockbroker for full enjoyment. Toffee and leather on the nose, hints of heather and lilac on the finish.

Ever wonder how Dewar's might taste if they didn't spend all their money on full-page ads in Maxim? Ever suspect that collie-piss Glenfiddich was expensive Scottish revenge on Americans who turned tartans into comfortor covers? Ever have only $8 in your pocket but a rather more refined palate than you thought satisfiable for under a sawbuck? Here you go.

Tell 'em the Swill sent you (purely figurative, we're not guerrilla marketers or anything).

Upon Agreement

2006-05-03T00:42:00.000-04:00

It may be self-loathing that makes a thug, but it's a numb smile that pisses him off.

-- Leo Kottke

De Rerum Fartura

2006-05-02T09:56:00.000-04:00

Our title today is a thickly veiled threat to those who mistakenly believe that deep-fried Swill is available upon demand. More than just a cheap philosophical pun, we hope that the phrase evokes a faint whiff of internal corruption, a pungent and nonmetaphorically flatulent reply to any and all who arrive here seeking -- of all things -- service.

The Swill may be quotidian, but is rarely daily. Translatio? A figurative fart upon thee, impatient reader, for we are neither fast nor food.

The canines of northern Europe, however, cannot say as much.

Unlike our own reasty riposte to the hurry-upniks, the rotten stench in the state of Denmark turns out to be resolutely literal: it is the bouquet of undigested kibble emanating from the Royal Underbelly itself. Brace yourselves: while the American news media is once again silent on a major issue of international importance, Der Spiegel is reporting that Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark / Husband of Queen Margrethe II, enjoys the taste of roasted dog flesh.

Long the staple of smug slurs against the good people of Korea, caninophagia has been out of fashion in Europe for some time. Horse and donkey, of course, remain fare game: we know a place in Verona that serves a truly tantalizing pastissada (recommended wine: Amarone), and we have chewed on salami d'asino in a Piedmontese market (try it with Barbera). We know that the Belgians like their tartare de cheval, and more affluent diners should sample sakuranabe while in Tokyo.

But dogs? Not so much. In England, after all, dogs (and horses, for that matter) enjoyed legal protection against abuse some decade before children did. We are accordingly unsurprised that Danish animal lovers are aghast at the prospect of their queen being kissed with the same lips that smack over greasy Fido bits, not least because Prince Henrik is past president of a national Dachsund Society.

Perhaps you're outraged too, dear reader, but come on. No matter what your stance on this issue -- Peter Singer, we know you're out there -- one must give the Prince mad-ass props for his admirably practical, seemingly unironic, and perhaps typically Scandinavian assessment of the issue: "Das ist genauso wie mit Hühnchen."

Yes, dear Friends, as if you needed a member of the Royal Family to confirm what you always suspected: Dachsund does indeed taste like chicken.

Look it Up

2006-04-28T23:37:00.000-04:00

Jurors deciding whether or not Zacarias Moussaoui should be put to death will have no lexicographical help, a judge has ruled. Apparently the presence of a dictionary in the jury room would constitute "additional evidence." We're sure there's something important here, but we're going to let the prescriptivists and descriptivists sort it out amongst themselves.

Why? Because after reading this seemingly unrelated story, we need time with our own Webster's to find a word that means "We Told You So, and Are Therefore Not Shocked, Just Wondering When These Guys Will Return."

Probably a German dictionary would be more helpful.

Work with Us, People

2006-04-27T11:08:00.000-04:00

The more we cast our baleful eye upon the the faux currency reproduced in yesterday's post, the more it troubles us. What the fuck does this thing mean, anyway?

On one level, as a cleverly disturbing publicity stunt, the logic is transparent: "Whose country are you working for, George?" the anti-immigration paleo-conservatives ask. "Are you Mexican or American? This bill, like your service to the United States, is worth precisely 'nothing' to us, your Conservative Constituency, so long as you appear to be doing anything other than simply arresting and deporting [undocumented workers]."

Hell, maybe it's even simpler than that, and what we have here is a thinly disguised insult of the lowest playground variety: a way of attacking the president without actually using offensive racial and national epithets frequently directed at undocumented workers from Mexico, Central and South America.

Perhaps, however, there's something else happening here as well?

Is it an invitation to transpose processes of symbolic exchange and substitution (inherent in the very concept, theory, and praxis of money itself) onto the very different processes of migration and immigration: that is, a reworking of the concept of citizenship itself as an assymetrical process of symbolic exchange? Does it present labor as perfectly free of individual character, but in such a way that we understand not only the worker to be a unit that bears (without possessing) the value of its own labor, but the citizen as such a unit? Why else would the Good People of Bumfuckia require protection from George W. Bush's head, the head of capital, the head in the capitol?

Sorry that we've broken our promise to share our new Rough Guide to American Paleoconservatism, but we can't get past this image. Our attempts to work this through are further hampered by an eye that is leaking pus faster than Dick Cheney leaks classified information -- inhumane we may be, but nevertheless human -- and we've only got two more days of health insurance with which to sort it out.

So work with us, people. We want a goddamned close reading of the George W. Bush "Nada Pesos" bill, and we want your help. Do you think you can simply stroll by, drop in whenever you feel like it, sup at our hermeneutic table and take your leave with nary a fare-thee-well? No, the Swill is a two-way street, and it's about fucking time you swept your side of it.

Fuck! Our eye!

(Tip: do NOT type "eye infection" into google images. Trust us.)

Illegal Tender

2006-04-26T12:55:00.000-04:00

Friends, we have spent the last several days considering American Conservatism.

We have, of course, long maintained that the terms "Left" and "Right" are more or less useless for describing most of the formations, deformations, affiliations and sillynations in American politics, and it's no secret that healthy, subtle political differences are unusually difficult to discern amongst the demagoguery and stupidity that passes for mainstream political commentary.

You'll find organized Progressives in Texas and radical religious conservatives in Connecticut -- hell, one of them is getting nervous about his Senate seat right about now -- and that raving Maoist Howard Dean was a fiscal hawk who was loved by the National Rifle Association. Remember, the theory that running up large deficits isn't always a bad thing wasn't invented by Bush and Cheney, but by that fascist theocrat John Maynard Keynes. Yes, things may be more complicated than they appear on the nightly news.

It therefore struck us as a characteristically iconoclastic impulse to move away from the commondreams, the counterpunch, the Democracy Now, and the other sources of alt commentary, and to tour places that the average lib-lab schmuck Wouldn't Deign to Tread.

"What if," we said to ourselves, "Our anti-Statist impulses, roughly resonating with a more or less anarchist-libertarian-socialism, cf. mid-1940s Dwight Macdonald, were to find natural allies in the resolutely anti-Iraq-war factions of the American Conservative movement? There must be some on the Radical Right who are against gay marriage not because they hold particularly odious, retrograde, theologically-derived beliefs regarding sexual conduct, but because they're against marriage per se; because they think States have no business ratifying or denying personal relationships of any sort: gay, straight, or otherwise. There are certainly those on the Radical Left who hold such things."

Well, it wasn't the first time that we were mistaken and disappointed, but we don't want to ruin the surprise: we'll be reporting on our findings in coming days.

In the meantime, the image above is something we found plastered all over the neighborhoods we visited. Turns out that the "hurry-up- and-build-the-big-guarded-fence against the criminal Mexicans" fascist-xenophobe movement is sending them to Republican politicians during upcoming campaign fundraising drives.

Captions and / or close-readings to accompany the "Nada Pesos" bill would be most welcome.

Upon the Overrating of Friendships

2006-04-20T22:58:00.000-04:00

Introit

Sorry for the absence, dear friends, and a special apology to all of you who have recently visited whilst seeking guidance on how to build a trebuchet. There were, inexplicably, four of you just today, and we're fairly certain that you left unsatisfied.

Whoever you are, and however you got here, you should know that we hold the destruction of the Fairness Doctrine under Ronald Reagan at least partially responsible for the demise of an already-struggling democracy in the U.S.A. The horsefucker lovers got that photo of an increasingly embattled Katherine Harris, and what did you get, dear lovers of the trebuchet? Bupkus. In the interest of providing equal time to filly-uhs and philias, therefore, we offer you lovers of medieval war engines the attached photo of a particularly fine specimen.

Visitor, beat your dick like it owes you money.

It's been a rough week for the world, friends, and not a particularly easy week here at The Swill. But our problems are not yet your problems, and by now you're saying to yourself: now that I've taken the trouble to visit the House of Long Knives, what corporate or political monstrosity will be cut down to size? While I'm enjoying the pretty photos, what good deed will the Swill's prose accomplish, what ethical or aesthetic system will be retooled into a finely honed fighting machine with every sentence, what particular pleasure will I take from this, the champion of underdog causes?

The answer is: None at all, friends. Na-fucking-da.

A Few Things We Won't Talk About

We won't address the hilarious spectacle of W. encouraging his Chinese counterpart to allow free speech while arresting and charging a woman who spoke too freely. That would be too easy, and nobody gives a flying fuck about paradox or irony anymore in these here parts. (Plus, we'd kind of like to retain the right to imprison and torture members of particular religious sects, just in case we are named dictator-for-life and have the opportunity to visit a few fellow Christians.)

We don't even have anything to say about the emergence of retired military warlards, who -- secure in their pensions and about four years too late -- have decided to pick on poor old Donald Rumsfeld, that scrofulous prick, for mishandling the destruction of Iraq.

Despite your understandable pleas for instructions on how to think about this issue, there are two reasons why we refuse comment at this time: First, and most important, some of you may know that one of the Swill's senior writers loves his grandma, and that the ancestral ranch where said grandmother was born is currently one of two homes owned by Rumsfeld in Taos, NM. We are biased by self-interest and by a particular version of our past that exists only in sweet and radically selective memory. Second, we have yet to conduct a full analysis, and hate nothing so much as hastiness.

After all, pointing out that the invasion of Iraq is a murderous clusterfuck that was totally and utterly unnecessary? Excellent. Emphasizing the misconception that the 100,000 people your tax dollars have blown up in Iraq are the result of a tactical -- rather than an ethical -- disaster? Ummmmm. Further authorizing the voice of the military as the voice of truth in America, while simultaneously eroding the important distinction between civilian and military leaderships? We'll get back to you. [Here the writer further refuses to talk about the epidemic of birth defects among Iraqi children caused by the use of depleted-uranium shells in both Gulf Wars. Including, you know, the one that was a success. - ed]

No, we have nothing to say except Spring is here, and with the emergence of leaves in our little courtyard comes a flood of fond, arborial memories.... (insert wavy lens effect here)

A Recollection both True and Incidentally Allegorical

As a young man, one of the Swill's low-level editors spent some hard months cutting down big, healthy trees to earn a very few bucks. It was dangerous work, a short-handed and dim-witted operation where one had the opportunity to fell trees one day and set chokers the next, but he liked the way that nature would dwarf him with its majesty, remind him how small he was in the world, compel him to recognize his transient insignificance in the shadow of such seemingly timeless endurance.

He especially liked to reflect upon these feelings as the 32-inch bar of his chainsaw was chewing through and destroying the lovely vegetation that had, mere moments before, been one in a long line of quasi-sentient beings in the world that made him feel small and worthless. Take that, nature!

In the end, we suppose that we're concerned with neither trees nor with Spring, nor even with that sonofabitch "Scott" who ran the logging operation, who left town in the middle of the night, who screwed us out of a month's wage, and who will suffer the wrong end of a very bloody bottlewhipping if we're ever fortunate enough to sidle up next to him at a bar to be named later.

No, we suppose that what concerns us is the productive capacity of memory for pleasure or pain, and particularly to render the future prospect of human contact a pleasant or unpleasant one. Which, [If this post hadn't already turned into a maudlin piece of self-indulgent tripe - ed.] we would be happy to explore via a close reading of "The Big Chill," a free screening of which we attended this evening after a large plate of $2 mussels.

A Film We Won't Discuss

Oh My, how we would remind you of what a piece of crap this movie is, how it ruined American cinema by popularizing, if not devising, the obligatory faux-spontaneous-group-dance-singalong sequence, wherein a group of white middle-aged actors get their collective lip-syncing groove on to a Wilson Pickett song.

We would talk about how writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, who attended the screening and who spoke afterwards, served his audience a poisonous disappointment. We would point to or produce the moment when the audience failed to realize that they might well outgrow a variety of beauty myths (after all, beauty is youth, and we'll all get old), but that they would never outgrow the horrifically misguided sense that they should have had a youth that was eager and pure and idealistic. They would never shake the sense that, even if they'd sold out and bought houses and obeyed cops, it was okay because from their various outposts of demi-disillusioned success they might always come together around a funeral and be themselves, just share the love of a eight people who know each other well enough that they don't have to pretend. They will wake up in the middle of the night feeling that their lives, rather than this film, are failures, because they certainly don't have a group friendship that is simultaneously fascinating and deep and loving and trusting and jocular and true.

And neither do you.

The Crux of the Biscuit, or, Synthesize It Yourselves

That gnawing feeling in your gut isn't too much microwave popcorn, friends, it is disappointment. Friendships don't work like that, as everybody should know. You'll never spontaneously dance around a butcher-block over a classic hit from your youth, you'll never realize that you're among a coterie of people who love you whether you're right or wrong, you'll never have a space where you can retreat from the performance of everyday life, and you'll never live a life without wishing that you could retract a confidence that you made in haste. Friendship offers no collective redemption, and if it does then you're probably not paying attention, and watch out for what you deserve.

But we can't talk about that, because there's a few ice-cold bottles of Old Style that are saying nicer things to us than the whole lot of you combined, and even they recognize that it's horseshit: Kasdan, it was horseshit when you wrote it, it's horseshit today. The last five minutes of La Dolce Vita have more to say about friendship than your entire oeuvre; the monster has been dead for three days but it's still looking you flat in the eye, and you can haul it up and sell it off but it won't stop looking at you, or us, or anyone.

Indeed, if we were to speak of it, we'd go so far to say that the whole goddam tragic failure of America in the last forty years can be summed up by the hugely successful soundtrack of "The Big Chill." Consider: in a film about the reunion of friends who met and bonded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, student friends who were politically radical and idealistic and who then bore hopes and dreams for the future as strongly as they now bear wistful nostalgia for the past, their memories and bodies are enlivened and enlisted by the goddamn Rascals instead of The MC-5. Their soundtrack, which they admit hasn't changed since the heady days when last they were ensemble, is defined by the eternal organ of The Rolling Stones and not a drop of Gil Scott Heron.

And that, friends, is a pernicious form of selective memory for a youth that never happened. But it's best not to speak of it. Best not to say anything at all.

Tax Day

2006-04-15T16:27:00.000-04:00

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.

- Henry David Thoreau

Pass It On

2006-04-14T18:25:00.000-04:00

We're not feeling particularly full of critique today, friends. We may not even be feeling especially angry, a state of affairs which is often cause for worry around the house. Illness of a purely emotional character often follows our brief -- if rare -- flashes of internal peace.

Perhaps there's an easy vernal explanation, as one supposes that one does feels somewhat full of Spring, sumer is icumen in and all that. The impulse to get outside was so strong and the birds so goddamn chirpy that, after a goodlie daye in the librarie, we gladly took up spade and prosecuted some serious redistribution of wealth.

Wealth in this case is another name for our compost pile, our garden's pride and joy, our contribution to a healthy environment, the means by which many a caprese salad will be produced in coming months, a proud steaming pile of rotten crap that is rivalled only by our finished dissertation. If you're not composting, you too are a lazy steaming pile of rotten crap, and the earth hates you. Nothing could be easier, and you should start today.

But composting is so fucking easy, in fact, that you'll need something to read while you wait for your veggies, coffee grounds, and egg shells slowly to transmogrify into clean-smelling earth. Therefore, while you're waiting, here's part deux of Mike Davis' History of the Car Bomb.

Upon Christian Syllogism

2006-04-13T17:58:00.000-04:00

Item: The second person in less than a year has been killed by a ride at Disney World.

Item: Contrary to initial reports, RU-486 has been ruled out as the cause of death for one of two women who died after aborting pregnancies.

Conclusion: "Mission: Space" is twice as deadly as RU-486. Ban Disney World immediately.

Upon Prolepsis

2006-04-13T16:37:00.000-04:00

We're back, friends, with a mouth full of Havana Club and a raft of spiritual infections antibioticized by the good, friendly people of Canada. Thanks to Phredward for buttering the nuts whilst we were otherwise, &c. Don't you fuss or fret, as we just suspect he'll be making a return appearance.

Anyway, we were pleased to see that the BBC just ran a fine story entitled "How Predictions for Iraq Came True." No, not the PNAC predictions about how Baghdad would look just like Providence, RI with a few short weeks of bombs, flags, and good ol' American know-how... Rather, those rather more troubling predictions lobbed by the Satan First crowd.

We've contacted the BBC, instructing them that they perhaps inadvertently omitted the thoughts of one guy who predicted that this would be a fucking disaster:

I asked my guide to ask about the plebiscite. The old man laughed. Oh yes, they had given out papers in the bazaars, but they were already printed with the vote for the mandate, so that the ignorant should vote for the government without knowing it.

The Americai must tell his countrymen that the people of Iraq would continue to struggle for their freedom and for the principles announced by Sheikh Washiton and Meester Veelson. The last revolt had failed because it had been ill prepared. Next time . . . His voice rose ever so slightly.

John Dos Passos, "Baghdad Bahnhof" 1921

Okay, so perhaps it's a slight stretch to characterize the current spate of torture-executions, car bombs, and general descent into violent factional chaos as a struggle for Wilsonian New Freedom. Then again, it was kind of a stretch to characterize WWI that way.

Vaguely related nota bene: treat yourself to a brief history of the car bomb, aka "The Poor Man's Air Force" by Mike Davis.

A Pretty Good Stab

2006-04-09T23:28:00.000-04:00

“I think it better that in times like these/ A poet's mouth be silent,” run the first lines of William Butler Yeats’ “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

A short bit of verse follows, commonly referred to as sarcastic—one way of answering when asked to write war poetry, whatever that is: “for in truth,” Yeats goes on,

We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

“Pleasing” young girls and old men—that’s what writing poetry’s about—and one would half believe Yeats, if one didn’t know how much of his writing is explicitly intended to set “statesmen right,” how un-silent Yeats was on the matter of war.

Which is why one calls the poem “sarcastic,” of course.

And then there’s Wilfred Owen’s way of writing a “war poem.” Almost contemporaneously with “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum est,” a not-too-great description of a gas attack. It ends with this stanza:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Presumably what Owen is up to has to do with getting his readers to enter the poem’s “smothering dreams,” making them “pace,” “watch,” and “hear” the obscene and bitter symphony of war. Both tacks, the faux-quietist-but-actually-sarcastically-engaged Yeatsian version and the poetry-as-vehicle-of-imaginative-horror version one finds in Owen, are grand and well-established. Yet no-one I know is asking us for war poems to-day—not for poems celebrating the so-called “war on terror,” for poems deploring it, for verse that seeks to tease or please us out of thought about the war, as Keats might put it, poems that make readers see, hear, pace, imagine what’s happening on the streets of Baghdad or in Afghanistan.

It would be nice if literary culture mattered enough in the United States to-day that poets and writers were asked to write. But another war was fought on the media-friendly fields of consumer capitalism last century, and what Yeats and Owen would have called “literary culture” rides on the wagon too. Which isn’t to say that one should be nostalgic in time of war for the old, high ways promised by Romantic diction, but rather that one can and should make verse out of obscene gargling, make sarcasm out of pleasure, and take pleasure in sarcasm.

Which is why I particularly admired the cover of the British paper, the Independent: “Iraq: Don’t look Away,” it said, over a particularly gruesome picture of the civil war there. They meant: it’s your responsibility; “pace,” “watch,” “hear” what your “statesmen” are doing.

It’s a pretty good stab at a war poem, even if nobody asked them for one.

Pox Populi, Pox o' the Day

2006-04-06T17:38:00.000-04:00

Joseph Grünpeck, Treatise on the Pestilential Pox or French Disease (Augsburg, 1496)

Nice to be in the Swill’s chair just when the shit-we-all-knew-about begins its chunky progress into that great Fan we call History, or its weak cousin, the New York Times.

Yes, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby has deposed that Dick and Dubbya “authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq.” The thing, we might agree, speaks for itself, and Scooter’s taking a (juridical) leak about the Plame-CIA leak is nothing new. The sweet dove of impeachment has fluttered over this White House often enough to become tiresome rather than stirring.

But indulge me just a bit, while I try to add “the leaky scooter” to the weird dictionary of semi-phallic, quasi-fecal nicknames at play in Dubbya’s universe (Karl Rove: “Turd Blossom”; Vladimir Putin: “Pootie-Poot”; Paul O’Neill, the ex-Treasury secretary: “Big O”; Mitch Daniels, Dubbya’s ex-budget director: “The Blade”; Dick Cheney: “Big Time”).

It gives me a positive frisson to find, for instance, that in Scotland, bless their tidy kilts, a scooter is “A syringe, squirt,” coming from the deliciously peaty verb to scoot, which may, the Oxford English Dictionary’s gods of etymology tell us, derive from “cooter, a dialectal form of COULTER,” which is “a simple plough with a single handle used for marking furrows, making drills, breaking up the soil in furrows or between rows of plants.” A squirt sprung or leaked from a Coulter (Ann, you should have told us!). Maybe from the loins of Dukes-of-Hazzard Cooter, or a Florida Cooter Turtle (Pseudemys floridana floridana). A little squib of a thing. Not even up to making its own furrows, in the grand fashion championed by “Big Time” Dick. Just turning over dirt that others have first plowed in.

So what makes Libby’s Scooter leak? If your thoughts ran (or flowed) venereally, grab a baguette! This week the French disease (yes, I know, it doesn’t drip clapwise, until matters get pretty far along) scooted back onto your screen in its most appealing form: millions of infectious French students and unionists lobbing the pavés of Paris at riot-police over a law trying to Americanize the labor-market over there. (In this case, and since we’re man-handling definitions tendentiously, to Americanize means “to increase the uncertainty of employment; reduce the clout of labor unions; disenfranchise young workers: trade new, cheap and inexperienced labor for experienced, established and expensive labor.”)

Ah, douce France! Sweet French disease! Guillotine, Danton, Marat, Robespierre—and sous le pavé, la plage, as the Situationist marchers of May 68 nicely put it. Here’s praying (ironically, bien sûr) that Scooter’s leaky scooter leads us all to the beach.

Upon Substitution

2006-04-06T00:43:00.000-04:00

Friends, the rhetorical familiarity of the Swillbilliana to which you are accustomed must be considered, to some extent, as its own reward. We don't claim to offer particularly new insights on the world, or even information that is particularly groundbreaking or hilarious or important.

What we do try to offer is a reassuring sense that water runs downhill, that the Swill is angry, and that the rest of the world is in its place.

Having said that, our own prose sometimes strikes us -- to appropriate Toni Morrison's phrase -- as the third beer: neither as refreshing as the first nor as reassuring as the second, and rather as that which exists to be consumed simply because it is there.

Well, for the next few days you'll be allowed to jump directly to the deeply loved fourth beer, because beer number three -- aka Your Struly -- is on a pilgrimage to Ottowa, where we intend to spread the gospel, collect some free fucking health care, enjoy a more-or-less-non-violent society, and pick up a case of Habana Club while we're at it.

For the next few days, therefore, you can't have us. But we offer you a fresh draught, a new smoke, a little bit of something something, the mastery and drift of s/he who shall remain Phredward.

Phredward: That's the name, wear it out with welcome.

More Democracy

2006-04-04T11:04:00.000-04:00

Yes, more democracy, Swillians.

Not in Texas, silly geese: redistricting across the nation (by both parties) pretty much ensures that congressional representatives will continue to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around. Accordingly, we hereby predict that some Republican-to-be-named-later will take the seat currently held (and soon to be relinquished by) cankerous scrotum boil Tom Delay. (For a tidy timeline of events in re: Delay, see here).

No, we're talking democracy by Swill. You see, it turns out that, under Texas law, DeLay "must either die, be convicted of a felony or move out of his district to be removed from the November ballot." And we want your voice to be heard.

Which one of these three do you prefer, dear reader? Specifics (of what he might die, where he might move, and of what he might be convicted) are encouraged.

We personally have already started praying for him. You know, ironically.

Going Quasi-Public

2006-04-02T16:02:00.000-04:00

Yes, friends, the Swill's reliably contrarian voice just tapped a bigger market. (First-time readers, insert irony marks around previous sentence. We have no market). Yesterday, we joined a thread on Crooks and Liars with the staggeringly improbable goal of objecting to the language of abuse directed at -- wait for it -- aspiring Florida Senator Katherine Harris and creepy Nazi Ann Coulter.

We're not sure if this makes us principled, or sellouts, or sellouts because we indulged a principle. It just makes us uncomfortable that the most abusive vocabulary netfolks seem to find to describe these loathesome trolls has to do with androgyny, transvestism, transsexuality / transgenderism, and fake boobs.

In short: to call Katherine Harris a "tranny hooker" is an insult to transsexuals, and particularly to sex workers, who actually labor for their money rather than inherit it. To use the term "drag queen" to abuse Ann Coulter is a grotesque insult to drag queens. When rightfully abusing Coulter and Harris, please fantasize about jailing them, shitting upon them, or abusing them in all sorts of non-gendered ways. But fer crissakes pay attention to the collateral damage.

On a totally unrelated note, the number of visitors who arrived at the Swill via google searches for "horsefuckers" has inexplicably spiked in recent days. We thought we'd dealt with this issue in past weeks (see here), but apparently the search engines disagree. So, we've appended the photo above for your delectation.

Maybe you're surfing the web in Bavaria (dieser Photo von Frau Harris ist ganz geil, nein?), Alberta (Great legs on this filly, eh?), Bend, OR (We assume you're a recent arrival from California?), or Oklahoma (We assume you support Tom Coburn - R-OK). Whatever the case, enjoy this image, and in the brief moment of clarity that follows, open the phone book and get some help you sick fucks. Or at the very least remember this moment when you're tempted to vote for a Moral Majority candidate.

Or, uh, Pro Nobis?

2006-03-31T23:32:00.000-05:00

In case your teletype machine is on the fritz, this just in: prayer doesn't accomplish anything when it comes to sick people.

You see, those good folks with working knowledge of the scientific method - deduction, experiment, empiricism, repeatable results, test tubes and shit - have expended time, control groups, and $2.4 million dollars(!) demonstrating what you already knew: asking God to stop afflicting somebody with heart disease doesn't actually do anything except, it turns out, decrease the sufferer's chances at recovery.

So, to be fair, praying for sick people does do something: it makes them worse. To be even more fair, however, prayer only decreases their chances of recovery if they know you're praying for them. Yes, you'll be pleasd to know that ignorance is doubly helpful in these situations.

Longtime readers of the Swill are unsurprised to find their politico-theological suspicions confirmed by scientific experiment. What we find most interesting about the study, though, is the way that various media outlets chose to announce the fact.

For example, the sturdy, no-nonsense London Times forthrightly states that "Prayer Does Not Help the Sick." Turns out it's not just Tory papers, however, that tell it like it is (in this case, anyway): even the wackily irreverent and reliably Labour Guardian says "If You Want to Get Better, Don't Say a Little Prayer." Hell, even the Boston Globe weighed in with "No Benefit of Prayer Found After Surgery." The Aussies hit paydirt with "Secret to a Speedy Recovery: No Prayers, Please."

Over there at Reuters, however (no Knight-Ridder, they) we're told that "Study Fails to Show Healing Power of Prayer." That's right, attentive grammarians and rhetoricians, bask in it: the healing power of prayer exists, it's the study that has failed. The unrelentingly crappy New York Times / International Herald Tribune hedges its bets - remember, they've been burned before - with the open question "Can Science Measure Faith?" Missouri reliably chimes in with "After Large Study, Power of Prayer Still Up in the Air." You know, like up in the air in a pervasive kind of way...

Now that we know that the chances of complications are slightly increased by praying for a sick person, however, we have a rare chance to use the enemies' weapon against them. Following our pal JST's suggestion on the matter, we hereby call for a Swill Prayer Circle. We're taking nominations for the first target, ahem, beneficiary of our religious devotions.

Requiescat in Pace

2006-03-26T09:30:00.000-05:00

Longtime readers of The Swill know that we believe in letting the dead bury the dead, and have no truck with nostalgic eulogies. Consistency has never been our strong suit, however, and it's somehow just too bad that Buck Owens has passed on.

Over the past decade, unrepentent fans of country music could converse amicably with even the most fashionably disenfranchised musical fascisto, so long as the topic remained Johnny Cash. It was Okay to like Cash, and maybe alright to dig some Hank Williams (Senior or III), but the young hipsters never really got the now-late, always-great Buck Owens.

Perhaps this was because Buck's persona didn't encourage flights of tough-guy fantasy on the part of the voluntary outsider. Perhaps he would have done well to sing more frequent tales of shooting people, or perhaps he should have been less of a business tycoon. Perhaps the bad hair and retro-hickdom of "Hee Haw" weighed him down publicly as much as the death of guitarist Don Rich slowed him down musically. Perhaps he didn't seem pre- or anti-commerical enough to make an attractive commodity.

Whatever. We wish people knew more than "Tiger by the Tail," we wish we could see him play live, and we wish we had the right words to salute his music. R.I.P.

Fuck You, Copper!

2006-03-24T09:07:00.000-05:00

That's all we can say about the fact that Texas law enforcement are now engaged in a concerted crackdown on public intoxication. They've decided that the historic focus on preventing people from actually committing crimes that endanger others -- say, by driving while trashed -- is inefficient, and thus a problem.

The solution? Arrest people from being drunk in bars. 2200 Texans have been arrested thus far, and we're tempted to compose a long analysis about the diminishing sovereignty of the individual and the rise of state power to protect us from ourselves. But it's just too tiring and tiresome.

Wah Wah

2006-03-22T18:27:00.000-05:00

You've no doubt seen the recently published study of a UC-Berkeley psychologist, who after forty years of following the development of 100 children has concluded that whiny, fearful, insecure, rigid toddlers are highly likely to turn into whiny, fearful, insecure, rigid adults. No big shock.

More interesting, if no more surprising, is the fact that these whiny, fearful, rigid children grow up to identify strongly as political conservatives. To anyone who has seen in Don Rumsfeld's eyes the paranoid anxiety of the schoolyard weenie who has rightly received multiple beatings for attempting to regulate the playground behavior of everybody else, this also comes as no surprise.

You may suspect that some toddling boobsucker will grow up and send money to Focus on the Family, send their own kids to Patrick Henry College, and send other people's kids to distant lands in order to fight unnecessary wars. If so, here are a few other telltale signs:

* Shits in play area of other kids. Claims trip to toilet would place undue burden on shit production and result in the loss of shit jobs.

* When snacks are distributed, tries to convince other children that comparatively large lunch given to him by his parents is evidence that he also deserves a proportionally greater share of snacks. Takes snacks by force if necessary.

* Enjoys breast feeding, but claims that other children's exposure to breasts is indecent, dirty, and immoral.

* Avoids science class.

You probably know more children than we do, and have probably seen other symptoms of impending conservatism. Please share in the comments section so that everybody may benefit from your experience.

Oh......

2006-03-21T15:47:00.000-05:00

People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. - Professor Jamie Raskin

Stop the Presses!

2006-03-17T18:55:00.000-05:00

Holy Jesus! Two women have died after taking the abortifacient RU-486, and the grammar of the headlines leaves no doubt as to the causal relationship between the two events.

"Two More Women Die After Taking Abortion Pill," the headlines scream out, and anti-choice groups are quick to demand that the drug be pulled from the market. Why? Well, because in the six years that it's been available by prescription, SEVEN women have died after taking the drug (it's actually a combination of drugs, and actually none of the deaths were traced directly to the drugs themselves, but these are merely semantics).

SEVEN women in six years? Sweet Jesus, why even have an FDA? When will good moral people of faith put an end to this holocaust? (N.B. The last link is worth following, if for no other reason than you get to follow the post informing you "Italy Not Catholic!" Late breaking news, indeed.)

In the U.S. we'll have to wait a few more months for abortion to be made illegal. While you're waiting, and in case you missed this in the news lately, you might consider that 529,000 women die each year from from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

If we did the math, we'd say that being pregnant and giving birth is roughly 453,428 times more likely to kill a woman than taking RU-486. Luckily, we believe that math is an invention of the liberal media.

Upon Mothers Eating Their Young

2006-03-16T18:50:00.000-05:00

"I did not like the original version of Leninism, and was skeptical when the Bush administration turned Leninist.'' - Francis Fukuyama

If referring to Republicans' unnaturally erotic appetite for horse-flesh was an unfortunate libel on horses, FF's characterization scandalously abuses Leninism.

Coming Soon: The Swill to Power, Menshevik or Menshevik Internationalist?

No Business Like Shoah Business

2006-03-16T09:18:00.001-05:00

If you hadn't noticed, Venezuelan Presidente Hugo Chavez has been taking some heavy hits in the U.S. media over the past several months, particularly on the subject of his alleged anti-Semitism. As less bombastic analysts than the Swill have pointed out, Chavez' comments were edited in the U.S. media to produce a rather different rhetorical effect than the one identified and understood by the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, who decried efforts by the Wall Street Journal and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, to dismiss Chavez as a cheap Jew-hating bullyboy. (Catch up on the important bits here.)

We here at the Swill resolutely take no position on Chavez, Venezuela, Semitism, anti-Semitism, oil revenues, Latin American politics, land reform, latifundists, or the subject of language more broadly. But we were intrigued enough by an interchange yesterday that we post it for your delectation and comment. The following took place at a rather low-profile meeting of some rather high-profile people. The Swill had unique access, and you - dearest Reader! - enjoy the benefits. Timely? Not really. Interesting? We'll let you judge. In any case, it's all we've got.

JWF: Stop being such a boob, MGS. How can any world leader not know that "[those who] crucified Christ" will evoke Jews for much of his audience? Not to mention that gold and silver were listed first among the riches (if you've ever listened to any of Farrakhan's comments against the Jewish money-hoarders, this language will ring bells).

Rhetorical stupidity thrives on both sides of the political divide, at the very least. What worries me more about this is growing alliance between fundamentalist Jewish interests and the radical and religious right in this country. This exposes one of the ways in which the neo-cons are playing both sides against the middle in the Middle-East (freedom and democracy my ass). But I'm not saying anything you guys don't know better than I.

MGS: One doesn't know; isn't the point of the article--and of the Venezuelan Jewish Community's letter protesting the Simon Wiesenthal Center's interference--that Chavez's language didn't resonate that way for his audience (at least until his audience became the Wall St. Journal, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, etc.)? Whether he should be attacked for not knowing that his audience now includes the WSJ -- or whether George Bush should be attacked in national newspapers for describing the Iraq war as a "crusade" -- is perhaps not unrelated to this issue.

JWF: I read Spanish well enough to make sense of it in the original, but what do I know about the tropes of anti-Semitism that circulate in the language or in South America generally? Nothing: that's what! So your point is well taken, though I do think Chavez's audience is more than his local audience(though to less an extent than Bush's is global) and thus he does bear the responsibility for the consequences of his utterances abroad (as we all do).

Certainly Bush should be condemned for using the word "crusade," but he or his cronies should be praised for "infinite justice." There's got to be a way to bring that one back, or something else pruned from the Theodicy of Leibniz.

JST: I agree with JWF, though in a somewhat elliptical way. I don't how much purchase the blood libel myth has across Latin America, but what I'm hearing here first is Oscar Romero here, not Farrakhan. I'd imagine that for a Chavista audience the image of gold- and silver-swiping crucifiers is most likely to evoke not the Jews but
the Spanish Empire -- and hence the caudillos and the contemporary neolib/con EurAmerican Empire -- by way of the Roman Empire, who actually crucified Jesus.

On the other hand, however, Chavez certainly sees himself as an actor on the global stage; he can hardly be unaware, as JWF points out, how his words are likely to be heard to the north and east -- not least because he's on friendly terms with Tehran. Quite a conundrum: what is an interpreter of good conscience to do? Clearly, our theories of rhetoric must be supplemented with a robust theory of schmetoric, but where is such a theory to be found?

O' Schmicero! -- why did you leave no written text behind?!

JWF: I think you've got it right, JST, and I certainly hadn't considered the weird reversal of the identity of the crucifiers you suggest among the Chavez revolutionaries (or whatever they are). But insofar as Chavez is undertaking a truly new democratic experiment against the neoliberalism of the West, he must be, as you say, an actor on the global stage (and I'm not sure what sort of theo/democratic, anti-globalist state he believes he's aligning himself with in Iran).

In any case, this will all be cleared up when I begin the First Schmophistic and institute my schmogymnasmata, through which we shall all learn the true arts of schmrammer, schmetoric, and schmialectic.

MGS: Thus endeth the lesson.

We Have Disagreed in the Past, but...

2006-03-13T09:51:00.000-05:00

Russ Feingold for Fucking President.

The Race Is Won

2006-03-07T18:56:00.000-05:00

In the contest to supplant "horsefuckers" as the noun most accurately describing neoconservative politicians, corporate titans, et alia, we are pleased to announce a winner: Phredward, aka Unclesiggy, has hit the figurative nail on the figurative head with "coprocrats."

Phredward is well known as the smartest motherfucker you're bound to meet, but we're still not precisely sure what is so darned appealing about his term. Simultaneously, it comehow suggests mimetic imitation of behavior (copycats) as much as it does shitheads (coprocaps), shitleaders as much as shiteaters (coprophages). All in all, we have here a truly grand term that nicely evokes the truly shitty job that the global leadership is doing. Or not doing, as the case may be.

Well done, Unclesiggy! You win a bottle of excellent Roman grappa, a heaping helping of penne alla amatriciana (to be named and delivered later), and a one-year subscription to Der Pferdficker magazine. Use them all wisely and separately.

While We Are Away

2006-02-26T14:39:00.000-05:00

We apologize for the silent space. Family drama and a desire for genuinely first-rate microbrews have taken us back to our ancestral lands, where herb, Doug fir, and salmon abound, but where computer access has only come our way intermittently. Es tut uns weh.

Speaking of and in German, may we briefly draw your attention to our masthead? Alert readers will notice the disappearance of the noun "horsefuckers," which used to follow the adjective "venal." Insofar as the noun was intended to refer to neoconservatives, we have been slightly disturbed to learn that a substantial percentage of our readers -- many of whom are located in Deutschland -- were led to the Swill by a google search for "horsefuckers." We assume that their time with our material was unsatisfying, to say the least.

Furthermore, our friend BC remarked, "As a former equestrienne, I object to your use of the term 'horsefuckers' in reference to Republicans. It slanders the horses."

In any case, we're not feeling very creative, and hereby solicit suggestions from our non-bestiaphile readership. What noun should replace "horsefuckers"?

Rome Fell

2006-02-19T19:33:00.000-05:00

Please discuss whilst we have the grappa surgically removed from our system.

nunc est bibendum

2006-02-14T14:19:00.000-05:00

The Swill is conducting research in Rome. We will return five days hence. We are running late for our plane, and didn't have time to announce this cleverly in Latin, but hereby request commoncrofts to provide a workable translation. Ciao.

Urine Trouble Now!

2006-02-12T11:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we realized that longtime readers might welcome a slight shift in tone, and that we would really like to hear from passersby. We therefore decided to celebrate recent free-speech imbroglios with an hilarious joke of our own device. Sadly, we only got as far as "So the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, a Danish Imam, and five-hundred Wobblies walk into a crowded theater" before remembering that jokes have never been our strong suit. We immediately shifted course.

Nonetheless, the intertwined questions represented therein -- viz., what constitutes "proper" aesthetic representation, how to demarcate individual spheres of liberty, and whether the state has a proper role in regulating speech -- are important, and made us nostalgic for one thing: Piss Christ. Rather than commenting, however, I'd like to solicit your thoughts (even so much as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" would allow us to write off the blog as "research expenses").

We're particularly interested in knowing why, when, and in what terms bodily waste became prima facie not just unpleasant, but politico-theologically offensive. If you're one of those who thinks that Bronze-Age Semitic sky-god lore + Renaissance papal politics should be kept in the American town square, then you presumably believe that people are made in the image of god. You therefore presumably believe that god made urine in his image, too, and that therefore the aesthetically degraded part of "Piss Christ" is not the urine, but the cross itself, no?

We're even worse at theology than at humor, so help us out. If you don't want to comment, at least help by suggesting a relevant joke, the punchline of which is "yellow submarine."

We Do Like Cuban Food, But....

2006-02-10T14:51:00.000-05:00

As some of you may have heard, this morning the Sergeant-at-Arms of the United States Senate spent some time with a satire I recently posted. The short piece under consideration involved Senator Joseph Lieberman, blood-libel, and a parody of Pat Robertson's evangelical calls for the assassination of Presidente Hugo Chavez.

You may also have heard, in a totally unrelated development, that we were unable to access our blog for some time after discovering the Sergeant's interest in our prose.

As some of you also know, The Swill's nostalgia for writs of habeas corpus is tied to an ordinary fear of extraordinary rendition: remember, that's what the newspapers call the state-sponsored-kidnapping wherein people are whisked off to be tortured in Uzbekhistan rather than being charged with a crime in the U.S.

Did we mention that you should always pay your taxes?

Consequently, while asserting no causal relationship and while admitting no complicity or liability in any matters whatsoever, we have removed the part about Lieberman. Anyway, all it really meant was that, in our opinion, Senator Joseph Lieberman is a cheap shill for the corporate elite, a low-rent bullyboy who plays upon the worst instincts of fear and jingoism, and should be called a "public representative" only in the broadest, loosest, most degraded sense of the words "public" and "representative." Hardly a new sentiment for anybody who's followed the guy's career.

We hope that somebody with money will send it to Ned Lamont.

Of course we're paranoid. By definition, however, paranoia magically becomes prescience with a single midnight knock on your door. Our next installment will relate purely to shoes. Not allegorical shoes, either. Just shoes.

One More Reason to Love Willie

2006-02-09T23:13:00.000-05:00

As if we needed one. Sorry for talking so much shit about the mainstream media, and thanks to Common Dreams, where you can find the whole AP story.

Finally

2006-02-09T00:56:00.000-05:00

If you're genuinely interested in gaining a deeper appreciation for the Danish cartoon business, stop reading MSNBC's coverage of it (or my dumbass blog, for that matter). Dig it here. Thanks to our good friend Josh Landis at syriacomment.com for the recommendation (also thanks for the beers, Josh, but that's another story entirely).

Not Exactly A Scoop...

2006-02-08T23:57:00.000-05:00

If you're like us and spend more than a reasonable amount of time reading news, political commentary, and nutritional information, you've already seen this. If so, very sorry to be part of the low-grade echo chamber. We're new to the business, and easily tempted by cheap self-gratification. Ahem. Renting a hall to eulogize a recently departed civil rights icon? $50,000. A picture of the Commander in Chief cranking a blaster while the First Lady shoots a death-ray at an Uppity Negro who has dared to make a political statement from the pulpit? Priceless.

If you haven't seen this image, it's from the funeral of Coretta Scott King, and it was taken while the Reverend Joseph Lowery delivered a few choice morsels of eulogy, including the following (now oft-quoted) lines:
We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there [standing ovation]... but Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more; but no more for the poor.
Finally some Christian palaver we can get behind. One-hundred-fuckin-percent. Thanks to JT for the spot-on.

Dark as a Dungeon

2006-02-08T00:10:00.000-05:00

Too bad about all the recent mine tragedies, no? Who could have predicted them? Just part of a dangerous business, I guess. Tough work.

Good thing that we have a government to oversee this sort of business -- you know, make sure that at least some decisions are driven by something other than profit-logic. The headlines of the major dailies, after all, tell you that "Feds Mandate More Oxygen in Mines." Hooray! We were all mistaken! We claimed that this is an administration that consistently puts short-term financial windfalls over long-term preservation of infrastructure, environment, and human life, and we were wrong! These recent tragedies have revealed a flaw in the system that we now know we should address. If the American worker needs oxygen three miles underground, by god, he's going to have it!

Too bad most of the papers don't note that it was these same exact federal officials who "four years ago axed a requirement to stock coal mines with spare emergency air masks to protect miners from poisonous gases."

That is to say, praise the Bush Administration for reversing a decision they themselves made four years ago, the results of which directly doomed workers to a horrible death by suffocation. That is to say, they claimed four years ago that such safety regulations were just too expensive (and unnecessary) to mandate, and that such requirements were just another sign that Federal government was out of control. So they stopped requiring extra oxygen masks in mines. And it killed people.

Notice that in Canada they did not reverse these regulations. Consequently, potash miners in a disaster similar to the one in West Virginia all survived. Thank you, Canada!

In the long run, however, I guess eighteen miners is a drop in the gut-bucket for the venal fuckwits who are running the U.S.A. Best not start calculating the WV miners as a percentage of overall killed, at least just yet; we reckon there's more to come.

We Wish We Could Draw

2006-02-07T10:58:00.000-05:00

Your days and nights are assuredly occupied, like ours, with the Danish cartoon brouhaha. We're still pretty comfortable with our original analysis: unfettered public speech good, fundamentards bad. Nonetheless, now it turns out that the same newspaper refused to run some Jesus caricatures a few years ago. Sigh. The rationale? It might offend some readers. (Full story here.)

You're not surprised, of course: readership = advertising = $ in the newspaper biz, $ = tax revenues, and one doesn't build such an attractive middle-class society entirely upon tins of butter-cookies. And, while the Danes may not produce nearly as many reactionary jerkoffs as the U.S.A. (cf. The Minutemen), it's not as if Middle-Eastern and African immigration is a non-issue in Scandanavia, where justified smugness is only slightly more attractive than unjustified smugness. "Xenophobia" is currently the second-most popular name for Danish baby girls.

In the end, we have no real solutions to these complicated issues. We do feel, however, that the publishers could at least run a new cartoon. Picture, if you will:

A gas station outside of Las Vegas, where Jesus Christ wearing camoflage performs fellatio on George Bush, while Jack Abramoff in a pimp suit stands counting a fistful of dollars. Nearby, Alberto Gonzalez disguised in a freakishly oversized sombrero sneaks across the California-Nevada border while brandishing a surveillance microphone shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, a ghostly Ronald Reagan refuels an MX missle from a gas pump shaped like a coffin, wondering aloud "Is Tehran still thataway?" The caption reads "Emergency! Somebody call 9/11!"

Why produce and run such a cartoon? Because it would reframe discussions about the role of theology in the secular nation state? Because it would defuse global tensions and help rebuild the embassies in Beirut and Damascus? Because what this world needs is more poignant political allegory?

No. Because we think that would be a fuckin' sweet cartoon.

Check the Date

2006-02-05T23:56:00.000-05:00

We are forced to conclude that a mere happy coincidence combined with a facile talent for idealistic emotion enabled the President to pass so plausibly from the defense of self-interest, which was his occasion and elaborated justification of war, to the crusade for democracy which is the ideological form under which it will be fought.
- Max Eastman, June 1917

Fundamentards

2006-02-03T14:55:00.000-05:00

Today, ABC news reported that the "US Backs Muslims in Cartoon Dispute."

We personally would have written a different headline: "US Continues to Discourage Freedom of the Press ; encourages self-censorship" has a nice ring. Or perhaps "Fundamentalist Christians in Power Support Fundamentalist Muslims Out of Power; support limited to content of funny pages."

I also would have subsumed a variety of cartoons in my analysis: remember when Mary Worth refused to wear a burka? Who can forget the day when Ziggy stared off into a huge sunset and reflected upon the fact that all the Jews wouldn't just be Left Behind, but actively dropped into the fiery pits of Hell for all eternity?

In any case, we truly appreciated the State Department's spokesman's assertion that "Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this way is not acceptable."

Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds by abandoning the Nuremburg principles and shitting on the U.N. charter, toppling the governments of sovereign nations, imposing Federalism on arbitrarily-delineated, colonially demarcated states, destroying both humans and basic infrastructure and subsequently failing to establish pre-war levels of sewage treatment, potable water, or electricity, on the other hand, is just not only acceptable, it's sound foreign policy. You know, Spreading Freedom and sich.

The entire situation -- protesters, supporters, commentators -- is pretty much dominated by fucktards. Sadly, we don't really get most of the cartoons. Perhaps they're hilarious in Danish.

Legal Analysis

2006-02-02T11:09:00.000-05:00

So a few hours after joining the Supreme Court, Alito broke with the terrifying triumvirate of Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts. Surprise!

Intriguingly (since the percentage of Catholics on the Supreme Court is exactly twice the percentage of the U.S. population that is Catholic), he broke with them over the issue of capital punishment. As you know, the Swill very strongly believes that the death penalty is a powerful symbol of illegitimate state power over individuals (and about four hundred other things). This is indeed one of the very, very few positions that we share with the Catholic Church (our reasoning is different, but the results are the same).

Unfortunately, our crack team of legal researchers is on currently on crack, and while we like -- very much like -- this kind of pithy critique, we also want more. After all, as legal historian Michael Klarman has recently demonstrated, the Supreme Court has all sorts of backroom (and frontroom, and courtroom) tactics that are as motivated by Public Relations as by legal scholarship. Perhaps Alito knew that Roberts, et al. were going to lose anyway, and thought he'd kick things off with the appearance of independence.

If you see any good analysis re: Alito's vote, please do share. We're not feeling researcherly today.

Kimchee

2006-02-01T10:07:00.000-05:00

Or, if you prefer, kimchi. Either way, it's delicious.

No further information may be divulged at this time.